Читать книгу Chicken - Paul R. Josephson - Страница 9

A major reason for the success of the broiler has been growing consumer demand for chicken meat. Consumers are major actors in the chicken story – and in animal meat industries generally. Granted, in this book I focus on the production and technology sides of broilers. But it must be pointed out – if it is not obvious – that consumers north and south, east and west, in post-industrial nations and traditional peasant societies, have a growing, almost insatiable, appetite for meat. They want it on the table at home, and they want more poultry. They love it at KFC in China – the average Chinese person now eats more meat annually than the average American person. They want their nuggets when they pull up to a drive-in window of a fast-food joint in the US. France has become the fourth-largest producer and consumer of chicken in the world, satisfying to the French palate, and through exports also those of Saudis, South Africans, Spaniards and Brits. Americans consumed, in one day, 1.3 billion chicken wings during the broadcast of the 2018 football Super Bowl alone. July 29 in the US is National Chicken Wing Day. (Boneless wings, increasingly promoted by restaurants, are not wings at all, but slices of breast meat deep-fried like wings and served with sauces.)

Consumers seem content not to think about factory farms or the agricultural laborers who toil in them. They have offered little criticism – until recently – of deforestation of vast tracts of land to facilitate meat, especially beef, production that has finally captured attention owing to a summer 2019 crisis in Amazonia. And few people have embraced vegetarianism among the major meat-producing countries and regions – the EU, China, the US and Brazil. People want their chicken, and they want it now. They often care little about, or are unaware of, the additional costs to the globe of factory production of meat. Or perhaps they have become inured to factory-farm food because what they see in advertisements is gorgeously contrived steaming hot food to gobble, and what they see in stores comes in neat, clean, convenient packages. Over 7 billion people demand protein, and they eat a lot of chicken to get it. They want their chicken breasts breaded, fried, with parmesan, kung pao; their legs and thighs baked; their strips lightly floured, and so on – just as they enjoy eggs over-easy, sunny side up, coddled and poached. In many places, consumers have embraced foodie culture that has resulted in the glorification of oral gratification, but that some people believe provides moral cover to gluttony, and here, too, chicken is a presence.

Chicken has grown in demand and consumption for a variety of other reasons. In the 1970s and 1980s, doctors recommended that their patients eat less meat with saturated fat; the knowledge for patients that a diet high in fatty foods contributed to heart disease, arterial sclerosis and cancer had been available decades earlier.³ But, after Senator George McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs published the Dietary Goals for the United States in 1977, many more physicians and citizens took notice. The National Academy of Sciences followed this in 1982 with the publication of Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer. Chicken provided an alternative safer and less fatty than beef and pork, and chicken production businesses took advantage of this situation in advertising campaigns. Some people argue that, as a result, many people turned to another kind of diet high in sugars (carbohydrates) that led to the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes that has affected a growing number of countries since the 1990s. But Dietary Goals in fact called for a substantial reduction in sugar consumption and an increase in consumption of carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables and grains. In any event, in addition to sugars – not fruits, vegetables and grains – chicken was a winner.

Second, chicken is cheaper to produce than other animal meats. The broiler has been developed into a highly efficient meat-producing machine. According to some estimates, it takes 5 kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef, ungulate land and water use requirements are higher than for chickens, and labor inputs are more extensive than for chickens. Chicken meat is produced at a 2-to-1 ratio of feed to bird. And the bigger, meatier birds that mature within six weeks are simply cheaper to produce than cattle who take months and years to reach slaughter weight. Finally, even if people in many countries are eating somewhat less beef, at times there has been an oversupply of chicken, which has helped to force prices down, and this in turn provides an additional incentive for those meat-eating consumers to buy more chicken product in all its forms.

The world’s citizens are eating more meat. To put numbers on this meat, in the mid-1960s, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, annual world meat consumption was 24.2 kg/capita by “carcass weight equivalent,” in the mid-1990s this had reached 34.6 kg/capita, and in 2015 stood at 41.3 kg/capita, with a forecast of 45.3 kg/capita by 2030 – or nearly a 100 percent increase in 70 years. Of course, industrial countries are the major consumers, with consumption growing from 61.5 kg/capita in the 1960s to 95.7 kg/capita in 2015, or a 60 percent increase. Consumption has grown even more quickly in “developing” nations, even if it remains far behind wealthier countries: from 10.2 kg/capita in the mid-1960s to three times more in 2015 at 31.6 kg/capita. Much of the increase has come from poultry products, where, from the mid-1960s to the present day, poultry meat consumption has grown from 3.2 kg/capita to 17.2 kg/capita, over a five-fold increase, and with international trade very important in meeting demand. In this book, we focus on many of the leading poultry-meat consuming countries and areas that are – rounded roughly – in order: China in the first position at 19 million tons annually, followed by the US at 18 million, the EU at 14 million, Brazil at 9 million and Russia at 5 million.⁴

But in this book, I focus not on consumers, but on other important actors. They are the entrepreneurs who first recognized market possibilities for chicken meat, not only eggs; agricultural scientists who developed broilers; lobbyists who pushed for reasonable and favorable regulations; government officials at local, state and national levels, including legislators, and also personnel of various international agencies involved in research, standards and trade concerns; and animal rights activists, social reformers and moral critics and others who worry about the nature of factory farms.

Chicken analyzes the state of factory chicken farms in comparative perspective across the globe, including how chicken meat has become a major international trade commodity, with a focus on the major chicken nations. Readers will note some emphasis on the history of this industry in the United States. The reason for this is that the chicken CAFO in essence originated in the United States and has spread – like a farmed bird with wings – to the EU, Brazil and Asia, especially to China. No country has been immune to the pressure of industrial farming, and it is instructive to understand the nuances of its practices from one country to the next owing to greater or less sensitivity to environmental problems, questions of feeds and additives – including the use of antibiotics – how to deal with disease, efforts to keep costs down – perhaps at the expense of the welfare of animals, and farm laborers, and so on. In this comparison, one discovers that, almost universally, the greater the regulatory impetus to manage factory farms well, the safer, cleaner and more animal-friendly are the production facilities; the US is at the “less regulation” end of the spectrum.

It should also be remembered that there is ultimately little difference between one kind of animal factory farm and another: all are geared to generating meat as quickly as possible, minimizing inputs, uniformity in production from birth to slaughter, and result in similar environmental, social and other problems. Broilers are only one kind of chicken, and factory farming is only one way to raise animals. Urban farming has blossomed in a number of places. Backyard, humane raising techniques are proliferating, and chickens of a wide variety of breeds and purposes – meat and eggs – are raised in small-scale settings. But it is a relatively small number of chickens raised this way – hence, my focus on factory-farmed broilers. Here and there, I shall mention ungulates, pigs and other kinds of farm animals to highlight concerns about factory farms generally.

The chicken industrialization process is going on throughout the world, and this means that, if the United States may have been the originator of the chicken factory farm, then the other nations of the world – and the producers, regulators and consumers in those other nations – share in the moral, social and environmental problems created by the expansion of those farms. Unfettered capitalism is, in essence, the source of the factory farm: it is the driving force behind the industrial ethos of the broiler, and it is evident in the prevailing profit motive of the farms and in the logic of production. All of these countries therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, are responsible for the brutal, international system of food production that has resulted, and hardly the US alone.⁵

Chickens are treated as egg producers, meat producers, and dualpurpose types. The broiler – a meat producer – is most often a cross of the White Rock and Cornish breeds. There are others: red broilers, Delaware broilers (crossing Rhode Island Red hens with Barred Plymouth Rock roosters) and others. Plymouth Rock, New Hampshire, Langshans, Jersey Black Giant and Brahmas have also been introduced to the mix. And, finally, breeders have worked to make the broilers white-feathered. All this means that today’s broiler is quite a hybrid animal, and very productive from the point of view of rapid muscle tissue gain. Other breeds do not reach meat slaughter age as quickly, so most operations go with the White Rock / Cornish breed. As will be noted below, the intensive breeding has led the broiler to be at risk for a variety of maladies, and particularly skeletal malformation and dysfunction, skin and eye lesions and congestive heart conditions.

The broiler made a long, scientific and industrial business trip over the century that is the focus of the book; early chapters consider the cultural history of the chicken and its “pre-industrial” history. An early bible of poultry published in 1914 indicated the growing importance of fowl to the US economy, well before production shifted to the southern states beginning from the 1930s. In 1910, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa – mostly Midwestern states – were the major income producers from poultry, finishing with California in tenth place in income, while there were four New England states in the top ten in relative rank with reference to average farm income from poultry, with eggs the leading income producer. In terms of the number of poultry, the Midwestern states again dominated, with Iowa and its 23.5 million in first place.⁶ Signs of centralized control of production that would characterize the industry from Brazil to China to India had already appeared, with transport innovations providing impetus – shipping in refrigerated and open train wagons to urban markets made this possible.⁷ But, as yet, there was no indication of the rapidly coming consolidation, centralization and vertical integration of future years.

Stimulated by producers in the 1930s who saw cost-cutting possibilities in Fordist vertical integration, assisted by growing demand for chicken meat during World War II to bridge pork and beef meat shortages, and enabled by inattentive government regulation in the post-war years, the CAFO burst forth in the US in the 1960s and spread across the globe, beginning in the 1980s. In some countries, CAFOs are the major source of peoples’ meat. Intensive animal production commenced in highly mechanized swine slaughterhouses, and in the chicken industry in several regions simultaneously, including Georgia and the south and Delmarva. Increasingly inexpensive feed (grain) and the growth of the transport industry also stimulated the industry.⁸ Between 1950 and the twenty-first century, broiler production doubled on average every ten years. In 1959, US farms producing at least 100,000 broilers in a year accounted for 28.5 percent of production. That share doubled by 1969, and grew rapidly to the 1990s. Virtually all commercial growers now produce more than 100,000 broilers in a year, while the shift to larger operations continues – from 300,000 broilers in 1987 to 520,000 in 2002 and 600,000 by 2006.⁹ To achieve such a dramatic shift in production and consumption, the US adopted the CAFO for cattle and swine, too, and in larger and larger factory farms that have, by the present, overwhelmed the countryside, local communities and the environment. Americans in 2015 consumed on average 80 lb (37 kg) of chicken annually, more than any other type of animal flesh. The US system of innovation, application and increases in productivity was followed everywhere, especially in China and Brazil.¹⁰

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a CAFO as an AFO (animal feed operation) that has been designated as a point source of pollution. The animals are confined and they are fed, rather than grazing on grass or other vegetation – at their own contentment and pace.¹¹ Yet the EPA had also made the determination that “facility” refers to a structure, and not to an entire farm. CAFOs are further defined by size. Large CAFOs have at least 700 dairy cattle; or 1,000 beef cattle; or 2,500 pigs if they weigh over 55 pounds or 10,000 if they do not; or 30,000 broilers if the AFO has a liquid manure handling system, or 125,000 if it does not. Medium-size CAFOs fall within intermediate size ranges and discharge wastewater or manure to surface waters, while small CAFOs are below the medium-size threshold, but are designated by local permitting authorities as significant contributors of pollutants.¹² For all livestock, the mean farm size has grown, and the “production locus” (number of head sold/removed) for over half of the broiler production in the US grew from 300,000 in 1987 to 520,000 in 2002.¹³ At the same time, the EPA allows certain exceptions to the designation of CAFOs as a point source of pollution, enabling them to spread manure and other waste with inadequate controls, and that waste has polluted lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, wells and land far and wide. Nowhere in the world has the pollution problem been solved. This is ecological dishonesty, and, along with the replacement of small farms with large industrial facilities, it has destroyed communities and ecosystems. However you designate and define a big farm, there are huge quantities of animals and a great deal of shit, no matter whether the sheds are in North America, Asia or Europe.

Factory farms, like all successful new organizational forms in capitalism, attempt to maximize output from well-controlled – and minimal – inputs. In broiler production, as befitting vertical integration, firms called integrators own hatcheries, processing plants and feed mills. They contract with farmers to raise broiler chicks to market weight, and to produce replacement breeder hens for hatcheries. The integrator provides the farmer/grower with chicks, feed, and veterinary and transportation services, while the farmer provides labor, capital in the form of housing and equipment, and utilities.¹⁴ In this way, the workers themselves are inputs. The chicks are inputs; the feed is an input; electricity and fossil fuels for ventilation, feeding, moving and heating are inputs; sheds, roads and machinery are inputs; and antibiotics are inputs. CAFOs also manage to push some of the costs onto the public that, sooner or later, are revealed to the public and require public suffering and expenditures to manage them.

One example of this phenomenon is antibiotics. The birds are at risk for a variety of maladies because of immune systems that cannot develop fully before slaughter. Industry turned to antibiotics both to prevent spread preemptively and to accelerate animal growth. Yet many of the costs involved in dealing with complex disease vectors on the scale of pandemics – for example, Avian Influenza – or to manage frequent outbreaks of Salmonella that require treatment of patients, often in hospitals, are borne by the public. Public health specialists worry about the growing antibiotic resistance of bacteria because of the overuse of drugs. Under greater and greater pressure from regulators and medical specialists, industrial chicken farmers have been forced to scale back the application of drugs somewhat. They and their spokespeople now refer to antimicrobials as a panacea for the problem. Recall that all antibiotics are antimicrobials, but not all antimicrobials are antibiotics. This is technically true, but also an Orwellian way to deflect the concerns of the public and regulators about the risks and benefits of antiomicrobials. If you need to use medicines in the production of meat, then is this not prima facie evidence that there is something wrong with the process?

A second area of concern examined in this book is the way that industrial chicken farming has become an environmental fiasco and public health outrage. Broilers are shit champions. They produce greenhouse gases from the methane in their bowels. For each kilogram (kg) of meat, roughly 500 grams of fecal matter result – no shit. Where is it stored? Whence the pollution and how is it spread? What of the offal? How hazardous and noxious is this material? What of the lagoons of shit and offal that result from the billions of animals (chickens and their meat-protein comrades – cattle, pigs and turkeys) throughout the world? Industry – and regulators – have been slow in response, and the dangerous, bubbling liquid masses – or the dried, odiferous “cake” that is treated by industry as manageable – have spread across the landscape.

Chicken CAFOs, beef CAFOs, pork CAFOs and other such factory farm operations are dreadful ways to mass-produce animal meat as if it was like any other commodity that can be mass-produced. They are a worrisome example of how the capitalist impulse to profit while meeting consumer demand has a very dark side: animal cruelty, worker exploitation, pollution and so on. Similar systems exist for other kinds of animals and animal products that indicate the universal nature of the meat commodity machine. One example is the tiger and bear farms of East Asia that enable rife animal brutality, where many consumers do not care about that suffering, and where powerful states that could regulate or prohibit the industry do nothing. They tolerate abusive practices, and even promote or ignore them in the name of money-making.

The persistent and long-lived trade in bear gall bladders and bear bile, for example, threatens the Asian bear species.¹⁵ While this trade is legal within some countries, cross-border trade of bear bile products is prohibited by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). But it continues and has changed from being purely for traditional medicinal to providing a commodity, with bile now being found in such products as cough drops, shampoo and soft drinks. A great number of countries buy and sell bear bile products originating in other countries in violation of CITES: Myanmar, Hong Kong, Laos, the Republic of Korea – the latter often with products from wild bears in Russia where hunting and trade of them are legal.¹⁶ The bears (and other animals in this trade for parts) are kept in miserable, caged, claustrophobic conditions – roughly 20,000 bears alone, across East Asia.

There has been progress in raising consumer and producer awareness of the cruelty and immorality of farms in some places – for example, Vietnam and Korea, which have promised to close them by 2020. Yet China remains wedded to them and is unwilling to entertain closing them at the highest levels of government, among consumers and, of course, the producers.¹⁷ Bear farming in Laos has begun to shrink, but the growth of facilities in the northern part of the country under private, mostly Chinese, ownership counters that trend.¹⁸ A European Parliament resolution of 2006 calling to end bear bile farming in China fell on deaf ears as China rejected this interference in a domestic issue,¹⁹ while tiger farming in Laos also supports primarily Chinese interests, tastes and consumers in the sale of parts, teeth, claws, paws, and meat.²⁰ But our focus is the broiler factory farm. Suffice it to say that broiler meat, too, is traded internationally, with birds kept in miserable conditions, although not in violation of CITES – because, with billions of the fowl, they are hardly an endangered species.