BIG-AG: The age of animal agriculture exceptionalism

The environmental group Madre Brava did a media analysis from 2020 to 2022 in the U.S. and a few countries in Europe. They looked at what percent of news articles about climate change mention meat or livestock. What they found is that it was less than half a percent, even though it accounts for about 15 to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Welcome to the world of animal agriculture, an industry which gets away with practices which would be considered illegal in any other sector. The scale of the damage these companies are causing is off the charts. It is just a handful of large multinational corporations that are driving this destruction, and getting away with it by influencing social policy, driving media narratives, and weaponizing very similar propaganda campaigns used by Big-Oil. And now, they are exporting their destructive factory farm model worldwide. A model of abject animal cruelty so devastating that treating any other kind of animal that way would amount to an immediate prison sentence in most countries on earth.

PLANET CRITICAL: A handful of multinational companies are driving environmental degradation and cruelty around the world to feed their pockets rather than the hungry’s bellies. Welcome to the world of animal agriculture, an industry which gets away with practices which would be considered illegal in any other sector.

Vox reporter Kenny Torrella lays out how this destructive industry has inserted itself into policy at every level of government, ensuring policy-makers ignore the fact the sector is the number one driver of air and water pollution, fresh water use, and habitable land exploitation.

While some Nordic governments are trying to push back, as Kenny explains, the EU bloc as a whole is deliberately undermining the plant-based food industry while the meat-heavy American diet remains the aspiration for “developing” economies around the world.

This episode is both devastating and revealing — but Kenny ends on a note of hope, explaining how, because this industry functions in the shadows, the movement against it politically homeless, meaning it could generate bipartisan support for animal-human-planetary health…

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT (IN PART):

The environmental group called Madre Brava did a media analysis from 2020 to 2022 in the U.S. and I think a few countries in Europe. And they looked at what percent of news articles about climate change mention meat or livestock. And what they found is that it was less than half a percent. Even though this is accounting for about 15 to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

I think a lot of it starts with just more attention on the issue. It’s such a neglected topic. And then I think with more attention and basic understanding, that can then pave a way for more political efforts to reform laws and regulations so that we can get out of this agricultural exceptionalism paradigm that we’re in…

The stats and figures of how animal agriculture has inserted itself into policy, how it’s driven narratives, weaponized very similar propaganda campaigns to big oil, and yet somehow the fact that it’s still not widely discussed is really incredible…

Explaining how all of this amounts to what we can call agricultural exceptionalism. That the animal agriculture industry gets away with practices that would be illegal in any other sector… It’s just a handful of multinational corporations that are driving this destruction around the world, and that everything we see in the supermarket is the illusion of choice due to brand diversification, even though they’re all owned by the same company.

And the scale of the damage these companies are causing is off the charts. Whether it’s the lost sequestration potential of forests due to deforestation or the fact that animal agriculture is the number one cause of air and water pollution, freshwater use and the use of habitable land. There are some moments of hope in the episode, though.

The Netherlands and Denmark, who are both being really innovative when it comes to the policies and laws that they’re passing to try and shift the entire populace away from animal agriculture. However, this is being done in the background while the EU is trying to undermine the plant-based food industry. And so we discussed that at length.

But while these hopeful examples do exist, they are of course rare and for the moment the fight against the animal agriculture industry is, as Kenny explains, politically homeless. The industry has bipartisan support in the United States, in Europe, in most individual governments around the world. and is growing every year because the American diet is the aspiration for developing economies around the world.

And these corporations have so much political clout that they are exporting their factory farm model elsewhere. Kenny also explains just how devastating this model is to animals. How their welfare is stripped away, how their rights are stripped away, how they are subject to abject cruelty.  In this industry and the cognitive dissonance that plays out given that treating any other kind of animal that way would amount to an immediate prison sentence in most countries on earth.

This is a really frightening analysis of the power of the animal agricultural industry, of the impact on the planet’s health, on the animal’s health and on our health. And yet, the factory farming resistance movement is politically homeless. SOURCE…

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