Meat Matters

As put-downs go, "full-bellied food (production) basher!" is a little long-winded. The parentheses give a clue to its origin; such a jibe has to come from the mouth of a bureaucrat or scientist. And yes, the man using it is both. He is Keith Hammond, who works for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. In a recent friendly exchange of e-mails, Hammond wondered whether this journalist might be just such a basher. He applies the label to the West's fierce but supremely well-fed critics of modern high-volume farming methods who forget that 800 million people in this world don't have enough to eat every day.

This is a sobering number of hollow stomachs to contemplate as Europeans spooked by fewer than 100 worldwide deaths from the human variant of "mad cow" disease endure the hardship of switching from steaks and burgers to chicken breasts, pork chops, lamb cutlets, roast turkey ...

While the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is genuinely alarming and shows yet again that European governments have trouble putting long-term common interests before short-term political ones it also serves to focus attention on how we produce food, a subject many prefer to ignore.

After the latest confirmations of BSE in Continental herds, three British scientists wrote to European Union food safety Commissioner David Byrne: "We would urge that the E.U. should both promote and provide substantial funding for an expansion of extensive and organic systems of beef production ... and a scaling-down of industrially farmed beef throughout Europe." They pointed out that the British BSE inquiry pinned the crisis on intensive agriculture.

Whoopee! For decades, full-bellied food (production) bashers like me have condemned the raising of animals in cruel conditions, the greedy use of growth hormones, the recycling of dead animals into the feed of herbivores, the degradation of land supersaturated by waste from intensive farms. Now, like these British scientists, we also worry about how Continental Europe is going to dispose of vast amounts of suspect offal and bone that, at last, will no longer be returned to the food chain, how plans to deal with all the carcasses of the millions of cattle to be slaughtered in an attempt to shut the barn door now that BSE has bolted.

That dream and those nightmares remain. But Hammond, a blunt Australian who is the FAO's senior officer for farm animal genetic resources, sees the food debate from a different standpoint: that of the world's 130-plus developing nations. This scientist takes almost the opposite line to his British counterparts: "Sustainable intensification of the majority of the world's food and agriculture production systems is a must." For Hammond, "industrialized production systems" offer the only hope of meeting the FAO's goal of "food security for all." To imply that mass agriculture is inherently bad is, he says, "rubbish." What's needed is to improve it, not remove it. He's glad that some farmers in England and Denmark have found it appropriate to return pig and egg production to grass, and admits many mistakes have been made in intensive farming's relatively short history. Here, he says, the Dutch have set the example to be followed. "They tried particular industrial production systems, found them not to be sustainable, and responded rapidly and in an outstanding way to make changes." Hammond's not saying that the bashers have no case. "Don't get me wrong, many of the current industrialized livestock production systems certainly need development to be highly sustainable and environmentally friendly." But he insists that "the bottom line is, you and I wish to eat two or three times a day," and even with today's intensive systems, the world's farmers can't fill the bellies of one in every six people meaning 800 million humans are hungry.

You don't exorcise a full-bellied food (production) basher overnight, especially one who has been a vegetarian since first visiting factory farms as a journalist 25 years ago. I remain much more on the side of the British scientists than that of Keith Hammond in the food production debate which, fortunately, BSE is fueling. But he does make you wonder if perhaps there is some middle ground to be found: high-density, high-output farming that at the same time respects both animal rights and the environment and has that sine qua non, sustainability. I have to admit that the man from the FAO has made me a little less smug in this debate. We bashers still may not buy all he's selling, but there are probably 800 million people out there who would.