Giant factory pig farms ,They\'re making us ill

When public figures speak out about animal welfare issues, their views tend to be received with weary sighs. But the way we treat our livestock is not just a moral question. Industrial farming is making us ill. Across Europe, in countries including Germany, Romania and Britain too, industrial pork production is on the rise. It is subsidised by our taxes, and yet no politician has ever asked us if we want it. Thankfully, people power is on the march. Last Wednesday, I joined some of the locals who are objecting to plans for an industrial pig farm near the village of Foston in Derbyshire. Despite 6,500 objections, including one from the Environment Agency, Midland Pig Producers (MPP) is seeking planning consent to build one of the largest pig farms in British history, capable of housing 25,000 animals. MPP is owned by the Leavesley family who live a comfortable ten miles from the site and whose £20 million annual turnover comes from property development, military surplus, salvage and farming. Also trapped, a few yards downwind from the proposed factory farm boundary, are 250 women incarcerated in Foston Hall jail. Outside the gates, we handed a few copies of the film The Dark Side Of Factory Farming to guards and visitors in the hope that they and the inmates would take the time to find out about what the building of such a large pig farm would mean for them. Right now, half of all antibiotics in the UK are used on farm animals and 60 per cent of those are given to pigs. The overuse of antibiotics in intensive farming means that these creatures provide a breeding ground for the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases such as MRSA,  E.coli and salmonella, which pass from animals to humans. Ominously, scientists have just discovered a new MRSA strain, said to be  present on as many as three per cent of dairy farms in the UK. There have already been 12 cases. Factory farms are central to all this. When statistics at one hospital in the Netherlands were analysed, it was found that 80 per cent of MRSA cases there were caused by a strain which had evolved on factory pig farms and which is now spreading globally to other farms and from animals to humans too. In one village of 500 people in America, at the heart of which was a huge pig farm, one in every ten people visited their local doctor with symptoms including skin lesions the size of cricket balls. While investigating these conditions, the doctor himself died of MRSA. What really bothers me is that even though these health concerns are well known, what Europe\'s politicians are doing is worse than nothing: the EU is encouraging factory farms. To help former Eastern Bloc nations catch up with more productive farms in the West, loans from the EU-funded Bank for Reconstruction and Development have been used to subsidise US-style industrial pig farming. As shown in the film Pig Business, one of their favoured firms is Smithfield Foods of America. Smithfield is the largest and most profitable pig producer and processor on the planet and the bank helped the company\'s advance into Poland. In 2006, Smithfield killed 27 million pigs: one of every four slaughtered commercially in the United States. An investigation by Rolling Stone magazine (hardly an agricultural periodical, but it contained this great piece of journalism) revealed that hundreds and sometimes thousands of Smithfield pigs co-exist (it is somehow galling to say \'live\') in a single barn without natural light or fresh air. Unsurprisingly, many are seriously ill. A pig can be slaughtered legally in the United States only if it can walk, and many of Smithfield\'s swine are  only capable of meeting this meagre standard by virtue of quantities of antibiotics, vaccines and insecticides. But America\'s industrial pig farmers live high on the hog, so to speak. Smithfield\'s former chairman, Joseph Luter III, retired in 2007 on a salary of £6 million, holding £12 million in unexercised stock options. If ever living proof were needed of the maxim \'where there\'s muck there\'s brass\', Luter was it. And there was plenty of muck. One Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generated more excrement in one year than the human population of Manhattan. The result was what economists might describe, less pungently, as \'significant negative externalities\'. Huge open pools of pig faeces, turned pink by a mixture of bacteria, urine, blood and excrement, could reportedly be smelled from a height of 3,000 feet. The pools – or \'lagoons\' as they are known in the trade – caused people living miles away to suffer breathing difficulties and vomiting. Imports of cheap pork from giant factory farms such as those run by Smithfield are now coming from former Eastern European countries to the UK. Whether it is our politicians\' ignorance or a blind belief in so-called \'free\' markets, their response to the cheap food flooding our market is \'get giant or get out of pig farming\'. Hence the introduction of vast factory farms near villages such as Foston. MPP plans to use a bio-digester, for which it would be eligible for public funding from the regional body Advantage West Midlands. Although this would reduce the smell and might eliminate some of the bacteria in the pig waste, there is still the risk of antibiotic-resistant diseases passing to workers, and from them to other people. I also fear that the small farms dotted across our countryside, which, like the one run by my uncle have for centuries provided us with good food without the need for antibiotic drugs, will simply disappear. And I believe that if the factory farms were made to pay the real price of their production methods, small farms would out-compete them. But then competing with other producers from around the world should play no part in the production of our food. We need to guarantee our small and medium-scale farmers a decent price for their products. Not just because new strains of MRSA should make us think twice, but because once our traditional high animal welfare standards have gone, they will have gone for good. We cannot act quickly enough.