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Animals farmed: China swine flu fears, Nigeria pig cull and permits for mega-dairy

<span>Photograph: Alexander Koerner/Getty</span>
Photograph: Alexander Koerner/Getty

News from around the world

Outbreaks of African swine fever (ASF) are surging in China following flooding in southern parts of the country. Farmers typically bury infected pigs, and the rains may have spread the disease via groundwater, analysts told Reuters. Experts have said the spread of the highly contagious virus, which is fatal to pigs, is unrelenting, with 200 million or more pigs thought to have been culled, slaughtered early or lost to the disease in China.

There are renewed fears about the threat of future disease outbreaks after a strain of swine flu prevalent in China was found to have the potential to spread to humans. A study found that 10% of pig farm workers tested had developed antibodies against a new type of swine flu named G4, suggesting it could jump from pigs to humans. China’s ministry of agriculture and rural affairs said in a statement that the study’s sampling was too small to be representative, and that it lacked adequate evidence to show the G4 virus has become the dominant strain among pigs. There is no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission.

Chinese officials have also announced plans to phase out the slaughter and sale of live poultry at food markets in the country. China introduced a temporary ban on the trade of wild animals and sales in markets earlier this year after the Covid-19 outbreak. UN officials have said there should be a global ban on wildlife or “wet markets” that sell live and dead animals to prevent future pandemics. But others argue that wet markets are being targeted unfairly.

Germany has vowed to help push for better enforcement of EU protections for migrant workers after Covid-19 outbreaks in German meat plants exposed “exploitative conditions” for workers. Meanwhile, China suspended almost all imports of pork from the Netherlands over Covid-19 outbreaks at meat plants in the country. The trade was worth more than €300m (£270m) in 2019. Exports to China from the UK’s largest pork processor Tulip have also been voluntarily suspended by the company after cases of Covid-19 at its Tipton plant in the West Midlands – and likewise exports to China from a beef plant in Brazil.

The majority of Covid-19 cases in US meat plants have been among black and ethnic minority workers, according to a new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of the 9,919 Covid-19 cases in meat and poultry plants where race and ethnicity information were reported in April and May, 87% involved minorities. The news comes as a major meat producer, Tyson Foods, was urged by more than 120 consumer and worker rights groups to take more action to protect its workers from Covid-19, including not laying off staff who are afraid to go back to work because of unsafe working conditions. Tyson has said workers who have symptoms of the virus or have tested positive will be paid while not working.

Pig numbers are up in the US despite reports up to 10 million pigs might need to be culled on-farm because of the Covid-19 pandemic and a lack of slaughtering capacity. The size of the US pig herd expanded over the course of the past 12 months to just under 80 million on 1 June – up 5% year-on-year. In the EU, pork exports from member states were rising before the lockdown and were worth €901m in the first three months of 2020.

Colorado has become the seventh US state to introduce a ban on the use of cages on egg farms. All eggs sold in the state will need to be cage-free by 2025. Michigan, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, California and Rhode Island have passed similar legislation. Meanwhile, senator Elizabeth Warren announced she had signed on in support of a proposal to ban the construction of factory farms and support owners of existing ones to ditch them by 2040 at the latest. The Farm System Reform Act was originally proposed in late 2019 by senator Cory Booker.

Free range farm eggs
Farm eggs will be cage-free in Colorado by 2025. Photograph: Ally Clark/Alamy

News from the UK

A decision by the German government to phase out farrowing crates, used to house sows while they are pregnant and after the birth, makes a UK ban more likely, the pig producers group NPA has said. Germany has given pig producers eight years to remove insemination stalls and 15 years to replace farrowing crates.

Aldi has committed to “never selling chlorinated chicken or hormone-injected beef” as it pledged to help British farmers maintain food quality standards. Waitrose has already said it would not sell any food produced to lower standards than those currently permitted in the UK. “We would be closing our eyes to a problem that exists in another part of the world and to animals who are out of our sight and our minds,” said Waitrose executive director James Bailey.

The River Wye
The River Wye has been hit by lethal algal blooms. Photograph: David Cheshire/Alamy

Farming groups have rejected reports that phosphate-rich runoff from chicken farms is causing the spread of algal blooms on the River Wye, devastating the ecosystem of one of the UK’s most beautiful rivers. Farming groups have argued that proactive visits to poultry farms have identified no serious issues and that long-term phosphate levels in the river catchment have been declining. The government body Natural Resources Wales said low river levels and sunny weather creating warm water temperatures had contributed to the development of the blooms.

The Environment Agency (EA) is reported to be looking to force intensive dairy farms to get permits to operate – as is required of pig and poultry farms. It comes after an EA survey found that 95% of dairy farms in one catchment failed to meet water protection standards and half of those were causing pollution into the river at the time of the EA’s visit.

And the UK’s main supplier of supermarket chicken has reopened one of its meat plants after an outbreak of coronavirus forced it to close down for two weeks. More than 200 staff out of 560 employed at the site in Llangefni, Anglesey, were reported to have tested positive for Covid-19.

And from the Animals Farmed series

This month we continued to report on the outbreaks of Covid-19 at meat plants, with unions pointing the blame at poor working conditions and living quarters in a sector they said is in a “disastrous race to the bottom, driven by the market and by consumer demand for cheap meat”. We ran a revealing report into how Covid-19 outbreaks at meat plants in the US were being kept quiet. And we covered the way in which the US government has been asked to ban the burning and burying of millions of animals, forced upon farmers by the Covid-19 outbreak, over the risk it poses to air and water pollution.

The European parliament has voted to launch an inquiry into the transport of live animals across and out of the EU. As Animals Farmed has reported, the trade is booming in Europe with an estimated value of $3.3bn (£2.7bn), with animals undertaking increasingly long journeys – sometimes lasting weeks – to places as remote as Russia, Uganda and Thailand. The EU commission has been accused of failing to act upon evidence of “serious and systematic” infringements of its own animal welfare rules.

News of the devastating impact of African swine fever on pig farmers around the world continues to emerge. We’ve reported this month on the hundreds of thousands of pigs culled by Nigerian farmers after an outbreak that started around Lagos before spreading to many other parts of the country.

We also reported on the huge sums of money being given to industrial livestock farms by development banks. A massive $2.6bn (£2.1bn) in funding has been provided to the meat industry by the International Finance Corporation (the commercial lending arm of the World Bank) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, despite warnings that reducing meat and dairy consumption is essential in tackling the climate crisis.

A group of investors managing trillions of dollars in assets has called on the Brazilian government to show clear commitment to eliminating deforestation and protecting the rights of indigenous peoples, after Amazon deforestation rose to its highest levels in a decade.

In happier news, we’ve written about efforts to try to regenerate deforested areas of the Amazon rainforest and introduce more sustainable farming systems in Brazil.

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