Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cereals, while Simon Mounsey of Feed Statistics reckons that 'off the top of my head the
proportion of cereals is now around 60 per cent.' 5 The bulk of the remainder consists of oil
seed residues - rape, sunflower, but mostly soya - international commodities whose price
is linked to the global grain price.
All the trends which Brooks pointed to have played a role in making pigs dependent
upon cereals. But much of the blame for the decline of the environmental pig must be laid
on DEFRA and its predecessor MAFF who have done everything in their power to regu-
late this recycling industry out of existence. The pressure to do so has come, not from the
pig industry, but from the requirements of the more influential beef and dairy industries.
In the second half of the 20th century, 'improvements' in the yield of dairy cows were so
great that cows could not physically eat enough grass and grain to produce the milk that
their metabolisms were capable of generating, so it became necessary to find a more con-
centrated source of nourishment. Initially this was provided by fishmeal from the Peruvian
anchovy fishery, but when the fishery collapsed in 1972, because of over fishing to meet
European demand, another source of instant protein had to be found. The answer was to
feed meat and bone meal (MBM), which for years had been rendered and fed to omnivor-
ous pigs and poultry without any problem, to herbivorous cows, and the result was BSE.
The BSE scare made the British public both aware and fearful of the rendering industry
and prompted a series of crackdowns on the use of rendered meat and catering waste. Hav-
ing caused a health scandal by feeding dead meat to herbivores, the government reacted in
1996, by banning the practice of feeding meat and bone meal to omnivorous pigs, whose
gut is just as well adapted to eating meat as yours or mine. The result is that now large
quantities of slaughterhouse wastes, particularly rich in phosphorus (which the world is
slowly mining to exhaustion), are being incinerated in the production of cement, or else at
Glanford power station in Norfolk, 6 and then landfilled, instead of finding their way back
into the food chain and thence into the soil via the more natural route of an omnivore's gut.
Meanwhile, pigs and cows alike are now increasingly fed on GM soya from North Amer-
ica, or non-GM from the Amazon.
In 2000 the United Kingdom Renderers' Association was still petitioning the govern-
ment to allow MBM to be fed to cross-species omnivores; 7 but in 2001 the ban was ex-
tended across the whole of the EU. The consequence has been a huge increase in the im-
port of non-GM soya from Brazil: the extent of recent deforestation in the Amazon exactly
matches the shortfall in animal feed that the EU has had to make up by importing non-GM
soya. 8 The rationale for the ban is that there a risk of pig feed being fed to cows. However,
the World Health Organization has guidelines for feeding MBM to monogastrics, even in
countries where there is a history of BSE, and deforesting large swathes of the Amazon to
provide soya poses a far greater risk to public health. 9
The EU seems to be aware of the
 
 
 
 
 
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