Factory farming and the next global pandemic

Communities

Generally hidden from view, but in sickness and wellness, humans are tightly bound to the lives of factory-farmed animals. 

The current outbreak of H5N1- already a panzootic (animal pandemic) – has decimated wild bird populations, successfully established itself in other mammalian species- most notably infecting nearly 1,000 herds of dairy cows in the US- and led to mass culls of millions of poultry birds across the world. 

Industry and government routinely blame wild bird populations for spreading avian flu through their migratory routes, but a growing body of research is increasingly challenging this position. The 20 billion chickens within the intensive system at any given time are now acting as their own sources of disease.

When it comes to pandemics and zoonotic disease risk, global attention is fixed on wet markets, wild animal trade and bushmeat consumption. We hear a lot about the need for surveillance systems, cross-sector collaboration and the ever-vague ‘community empowerment’. 

Global health discourse is awash with this kind of rhetoric, with pandemics framed as unfortunate but inevitable and ultimately manageable with better surveillance in faraway African countries – and resources for the impoverished communities battling on the front lines. 

Pressure

This is not just hyperbole; the long-awaited Pandemic Agreement is a case in point, with the articles on prevention lacking anything concretely preventative. 

There, too, we see the same emphasis on surveillance systems, communities and collaboration. All of which is good stuff, but the first global treaty with a mandate for preventing pandemics is suspiciously sparse on one of the main drivers of emerging disease risk-intensive animal production systems. 

Meanwhile, H5N1, or Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), continues to rattle around factory farms in the global north. 

If policymakers care nothing for the appalling animal welfare abuses at the heart of the globalised poultry industry, they ought to consider the profound risk to global public health; H5N1 is a pathogen with true pandemic potential. 

And yet the response has been slow and reluctant – it took months for the US Department of Agriculture to introduce mandatory cattle testing before transportation across state lines and only after mountain pressure from public health experts. 

Political

But this is nothing new, during the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or mad cow disease outbreak, British farmers fed their cattle the ground-up offcuts of other animals (including cows’ brains and spinal tissue) as a means of maximising production, growth, and minimising cost—feeding grain was more expensive. 

Economic interests led the regulatory response, and an estimated one million infected cows entered the human food chain, causing approximately 233 human deaths before feeding cows to cows was finally banned in 1988. 

Some experts have suggested that H5N1 may have entered dairy herds in the US through the practice of feeding “poultry litter”- banned in the UK – and cheaper than soy or grains, poultry litter is the calorie-dense mixture of poultry waste products (faeces, feathers and bedding material) used to bulk up herds more quickly. 

Farmed animals’ global market value ranges between 1.61 and 3.3 trillion USD annually. Livestock is political and politically protected. 

Threats

In tandem with this, the rise of an increasingly oligopolistic food industry—just ten conglomerates own half of all food sales in the US and the UK, and just four retailers —Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, and Morrisons — control an estimated 64 per cent of the UK grocery market further adds to the tension between profit, market primacy, and human health. 

Such a drastic concentration of profit and power means less transparency, and a food regulation landscape in which policy is skewed by industry interests and accountability is progressively nebulous. 

But it doesn’t have to be a global race to the bottom. We have the ability to prevent a new pandemic catastrophe – we can bring an end to confinement, cages and the nightmarish live transport of non-human animals. 

The case for doing so is no longer ideological it is the sustainable, non-partisan, empirically based policy response to one of the most urgent and existential threats to human health.  

This Author

Esme Wheeler is a global policy and advocacy advisor at Brooke, Action for Working Horses and Donkeys and is based in Brighton.