A new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health finds that apart from the moral objections, the local ramifications, and the nutritional concerns about factory farming, even the economies-of-scale arguments used to justify it don’t hold up. Overuse of antibiotics breeds super-bacteria with grave human consequences and attendant healthcare costs. And environmental degradation from these concentrated operations is so severe that it’s costing the federal government $100 million a year to keep pace with the damage. Local water supplies are being contaminated. Workers and neighbors are becoming ill from airborne toxins. Moreover, in an age of rapidly rising energy costs, shipping food from enormous centers makes less and less sense.
By the way, I have a favorable review of Gene Baur's "Farm Sanctuary" in the current issue of TAC; the piece itself is not online.
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And here I thought you were going to start on genetic engineering and meat cloning. *chuckle*
The true and complete headline for this would read something like: Factory Farming Makes No Sense for Society, but a Ton of Money for Agribusiness.
The problem is, factory farming is just one of many, many such examples in which the cost to society is huge, but so are the profits reaped by the manufacturer. Strip mining, clear cutting, gold mining, tar sands -- the list goes on and on. The economic phrase for this failure of the economic system to include downstream costs into the cost of the product or its manufacture is "externalities."
More and more the 21st century looks to be an arena in which we will be debating externalities. According to last year's Stern Report, for example, global warming is the greatest "market failure" in our history, because the cost of changing the atmosphere is not included in the cost of energy.
That's a mighty big can of worms!
The "free market" is a joke so long as so many costs are allowed to be externalized.
Forestwalker: bingo. Nicely put.
Kit, I didn't mean to ignore your excellent post. Here, help me with the can opener, because it's way past time those worms were freed. ;-)
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