Political Ecologies of Meat

Jody Emel, Harvey Neo, Jody Emel, Harvey Neo

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317816409
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Commerce
• Thema: Agrobusiness

Livestock production worldwide is increasing rapidly, in part due to economic growth and demand for meat in industrializing countries. Yet there are many concerns about the sustainability of increased meat production and consumption, from perspectives including human health, animal welfare, climate change and environmental pollution.

This book tackles the key issues of contemporary meat production and consumption through a lens of political ecology, which emphasizes the power relations producing particular social, economic and cultural interactions with non-human nature. Three main topics are addressed: the political ecology of global livestock production trends; changes in production systems around the world and their implications for environmental justice; and existing and emerging governance strategies for meat production and consumption systems and their implications.

Case studies of different systems at varying scales are included, drawn from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. The book includes an editorial introduction to set the context and synthesize key messages for the reader.

1
Introduction

Jody Emel and Harvey Neo

Species interdependence is a well-known fact – except when it comes to humans.

(Tsing, 2012, p. 141)

The ever-expansive livestock industry

The tangle of livestock issues arising at the beginning of the 21st century promises to provide fodder for politics and policy for some time to come. Just as the sentience and subjectivities of domesticated animals are being researched and understood as never before, so is the intensification of livestock production fast rising throughout the world. The ‘global meat complex’ is dynamically shifting from north to south with longer supply chains and complicated trade arrangements influenced by disease, animal welfare, religion and taste. More than quadrupling in size since 1960, global meat production was around 312 million tons by 2013 (FAO, 2014). Governments are subsidizing livestock and feed production in many countries, notably China, India, Brazil, the US, Australia, and the European Union. In the US, feed grains are the biggest recipient of government agricultural subsidies. India prides itself on its recent ‘pink revolution’. Who would have thought that the land of the holy cow would become the largest beef exporter in the world? How amazing is it that China’s pig production (and consumption) constitutes half the world’s supply (102 million metric tons of meat from nearly 660 million pigs) and that the country also imports more than half of the globally traded soy (Schneider, 2011)? China now consumes 60 per cent more meat than did the entire world population in 1950 (Ma, 2013), although Luxembourg, the US, Australia, and New Zealand are the biggest consumers per capita.

Also astonishing is the news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) that livestock production systems have generated more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than any other sector of the global economy. In fact, FAO claims livestock production is one of the top two or three ‘most significant contributors to environmental problems, at every scale from local to global … livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale and its potential contribution to their solution is equally large’ (Steinfeld et al., 2006, p. xx; also see Gunderson, 2013). Livestock production is one of the largest drivers of biodiversity destruction through genetic erosion, species loss and habitat conversion (UNEP, 2010). The sector uses one quarter of global land for pasture and one-third of global crop land for feed crops (Robinson et al., 2011). Thanks to imperialism and the European mission to colonize (and ‘develop’) as much territory as possible, indigenous ecologies have been vastly altered across much of the world. A number of researchers and authors have enumerated the ecological impacts of global livestock production/consumption. With the emergence of life cycle and footprint analyses, we can account for the magnitudes of water, pesticides, energy, and pollutants that are used or produced alongside animal flesh, hides, milk and eggs (see Weis, 2013 and Fairlie, 2010 for excellent and conflicting analyses).

The number of animal bodies – beings – involved is staggering. According to FAO (2014), 2012 saw the planetary slaughter of 1,394,489,497 pigs; 59,793,859,000 chickens; 2,546,236 camels; 1,206,844,000 rabbits; 2,939,796 ducks; 4,831,548 horses; 296,244,063 cattle; 439,998,718 goats; 706,329 geese and guinea fowl; and 535,752,859 sheep and lambs. These animals were turned into meat, animal feed (bone meal, meat meal, and blood meal), hides, feathers, wool, hair, wax, fat, fertilizer, fuel, pet food, and thousands of other products. How do we even comprehend these numbers of bodies that are given birth to, fed and killed? Sixty billion chickens? And global institutions like the FAO are forecasting the doubling of this production and slaughtering by 2050 (see MacLachlan, this volume).

Expectations of the doubling of livestock production are mind-boggling in terms of impact (see Gunderson, Saurí and Marchand, and Stoddard, this volume). Even if animals are intensively confined, thus limiting the grazing areas they require (and thereby reducing GHG emissions), they still have to be fed, slaughtered and processed. Non-ruminates (mostly confined pigs and birds) already consume 72 percent of all animal feed that is grown on arable land (Galloway et al., 2007). International institutions are calling for conflicting types of policy approaches, with FAO asking for more intensification to reduce the production of GHG emissions, and UNCTAD claiming less meat production and consumption is the way forward. FAO and others are also advocating livestock augmentation as a route to economic development and acceleration of improved livelihoods, particularly for poor women (see Waithanji, this volume). Yet much of the investment in livestock production is based on the intensification model and experience shows that it does not aid poor people in the intermediate to long term – but only those who can access the capital to make the necessary innovations in production facilities and processes (Neo, 2010). Furthermore, we are moving in the opposite direction (from intensification) in terms of social movements: many people are fighting for animals to be unconfined. Scientists, increasingly, are validating what many farmers, pastoralists, and sanctuary keepers already know: farmed and other ‘domesticated’ animals are intelligent. They have memories, they can tell people and each other apart, they bond with each other, they make mental maps, and they care about their offspring (Hatkoff, 2009). These animals have emotional lives; they get depressed and aggressive when their social patterns are thwarted.

Finally, there are issues with changing climate affecting existing livestock growers including pastoralists in some of the most vulnerable places of the world (see Archer van Garderen et al., Waithanji, and Rosin and Cooper, this volume). Existing and new diseases are also concerns, both those that affect only the domesticated animals but spread quickly with global trade, and those that cross species boundaries.

Just how the politics of livestock production are developing and will be shaped is an area of considerable importance for social scientists and the public. Will consumers lead the way or will new governance fora comprised of industry representatives, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and retailers (see Lee et al., and Johnson, this volume)? These are important questions that we will explore in this volume, but before we do that, it would be proper to rethink, more fundamentally, the relationship between human and the animals we consume.

Human–animal relations

Humans and animals have produced each other or co-evolved (Tsing, 2012; Shepard, 1997). As many writers have pointed out, ‘human’ is a relational term, only definable against an ‘other’ – a non-human animal or a machine (or perhaps a god or spirit) (Plumwood, 1993). As Donna Haraway wrote in Companion Species Manifesto, ‘beings do not pre-exist their relatings’ (2003, p. 6). Posthumanists like Braidotti (2013), Derrida (2008), Haraway (2008), and Wolfe (2010) have roundly dismissed the autonomy and disembodiment of the ‘human’, affirming the animalism and dependencies we share with other living beings. Posthumanism, although a contested term, ‘expresses dissatisfactions with modes of philosophical, social and political thought and consequent action which have derived from Enlightenment presumptions about human sovereignty and primacy within the world order’ (McNeil, 2010, p. 429). Assemblage thinking and monism have furthered relational thinking beyond the concept of hybridity, which Massumi (2014) argues still assumes separate domains. Also refusing to recognize firm boundaries between living beings, post-anthropocentrism, as explained by Braidotti, is an egalitarian recognition of zoe, ‘the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself’ (2013, p. 56). She argues: ‘Zoe-centered egalitarianism, is for me, the core of the post-anthropocentric turn; it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism’ (ibid.).

Postcolonialism and post-anthropocentrism also afford glimpses of the multiplicities of human-animal relations beyond the assumption of free access to the bodies of others. Vivieros de Castro’s (2012) anthropological findings that illustrate how many Amerindian myths reveal little differentiation between plants, animals and humans (they are all human) provide fuel for accepting the provincialism of the Eurocentric idea that animals are vastly different and lesser than humans. Descola’s (2013) work on the multiple forms of human cultural identifying and relating to animals, which he labels as animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism, testifies to the existence of ontological multiplicity regarding human-animal relations. He maintains that different cultures make ‘ontological choices’ about domestication; some choose not to domesticate even though there are potentially domesticable species available.

Whatever human relationships and identifications with animals, most groups of humans and particular non-humans have long, long coevolutionary histories. In fact it is amazing to think of the length of time over which humans and animals have been in relationship. As Vitebsky wrote, ‘[t]he reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) has been giving life to humans for hundreds of thousands of years over much of the northern hemisphere… One main migration route ran from Paris to Brussels, and another from the Massif Central to the coastal plains of Bordeaux’ (2005, p. 18). Alongside the taming of the reindeer, the domestication of goats and sheep has been ongoing for thousands of years and is said to have pre-dated agriculture (Caras, 2002). Domestic animals have provided security for humans within a vast array of ecologies, and in the process, humans were also domesticated (Anderson, 1997).

Whether symbiotic, exploitative, parasitic, or a product of ecology, the process of domestication is still debated. It is widely believed that the type of animal and its fear of predators had much to do with which animals were tamed and which not. Budiansky (1992) argued that the animals themselves had contributed to the process by being opportunistic in finding food in human settlements, identifying that taming is not the same as domestication as of course many wild animals have been tamed but few domesticated. Clutton-Brock (2012) claimed that some species have similar social patterns as humans (e.g. wolves) that allow them to follow a leader or accept the dominance of a human. A lamb might have imprinted upon a person instead of its mother in an ecological relationship (Franklin, 2007). Ceremonial uses of animals may be another reason that particular animals were tamed and included in the household.

Domesticated thousands of years ago, in various places including Eurasia, Egypt, India and Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas, contemporary meat, milk and egg animals still possess capacities they held in the wild (although domestication generally reduces the size of the brain). Domesticated animals can still breed with their wild counterparts although they generally do not because they are confined, yet some pastoralists do still depend upon this breeding practice. Domesticated animals can also become feral or wild again; wild cattle roamed Organ Pipe National Monument in the US just 30 years ago and persevere in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. Thought to be a civilizing enterprise, one that pulled ‘man’ from barbarism into higher cultural forms, domestication and production of animals has received enormous scientific and technological attention over the past couple of centuries. The animal sciences are featured at all land grant schools in the United States and at universities in virtually every other country. Such an enlightenment impulse to improve, this application of science to breeding, has also permeated the human realm (through education, eugenics programs, medical screening), just as the impulse to domesticate became part and parcel of further humanizing the putatively less than human (Anderson, 1997).

The alteration of ecologies through domestication has produced tremendous change. Some have called it ecological cleansing because the original ‘wildlife’ (the term in the English language used to denote non-domesticated animals) were eliminated to make room for the domesticated animals (Emel, 1995). Just consider the American bison – Europeans found herds so vast they couldn’t see past them for ten miles. One observer said it took five days for a herd to cross a particular location (Gard, 1959). But by the late 1880s, they were nearly gone and the cattle industry was booming. Imagine – animals domesticated some 20,000 years ago now constitute 65 per cent of all terrestrial vertebrates by weight (humans evolved from other apes some 200,000 years ago). Humans and their pets constitute most of the rest with wildlife a mere 3 per cent (Serpell, 2012, ix).

How does intensified animal production change the people and animals who live in societies which practice it? Bulliet (2005) distinguishes between what he calls ‘postdomesticity’ and domesticity. He claims that domesticity refers to the social, economic and intellectual dimensions of communities in which most members have daily contact with domestic animals (other than pets) and postdomesticity is a situation in which most people live far from the animals exploited for food, fiber and other goods, and they do not witness births, deaths, daily lives, and other practices utilized to intensively produce such animals. And while they continue to consume large quantities of these animals and their products, these people may experience feelings of guilt and discomfort from doing so, in part, because they have such close relationships with companion animals. He claims that this separation produces different perspectives among people, illustrating his point with the example of children witnessing animal sexuality or reproduction during life on the farm, ranch or grassland. When the witnessing stops, people change; their fantasies, their interest in sex, and their protectiveness about visualizing sexual acts shift. Many people in urban areas fail to relate to the animals at all, but merely think of their meat as the packaged stuff in the grocery store. If they are aware of the life of the meat, there is little ethical concern and what exists is delegated to the meat retailer or the government; high welfare meat is a niche market (Schroder and McEachern, 2004; Vanhonacker and Verbeke, 2014; Neo, this volume). We would venture to guess that many Americans, at least, fail to realize that cows have to be birthing calves to provide milk, believing that cows, unlike humans, provide milk on demand. Within this postdomestic situation, the animals are not only lesser subjects than humans and therefore deemed worthy of complete domination, but also objects – machines of production, bred for docility unless it clashes with other desirable attributes. There is even talk of producing animals with neural discontinuities such that they won’t feel as much pain or depression in confinement. Postdomestic meat and milk animals have lost their biolegitimacy – they’ve become de-animalized, socially deprived, alienated from their own products and from the outdoors (Noske, 1997). Spatially removed and hidden from site, they are isolated and ignored by most of society unless there is a health scare (like BSE) (see Lee et al., this volume; Stuart et al., 2013). This is a far cry from earlier forms of domestication or from pastoralism where animals interact with each other and the outdoors, and maintain their natural reproduction cycles. We will come back to the importance of visualizing, not just sexual acts, births and deaths, but also animal lives day-to-day in the factory farms.

The livestock bioeconomy

What should be clear is that the livestock industry is a prime example of a bioeconomy – an extensive economy that explicitly deals with, and modifies lives. Many of us think of the bioeconomy – generally referring to clones, genetic engineering, organ transplants and other biotechnologies – as new. Yet the global meat industry, both old and new, is fundamentally a bioeconomy as Lewis Holloway so aptly illustrates in this volume (also see Twine, 2010). A bioeconomy is characterized by the capture of the latent value found in biological material, purportedly to achieve some version of sustainability (Birch and Tyfield, 2013). Animal bodies produce value; their bodily growth and reproduction is subsumed within capitalist social relations, especially under conditions of factory farming. Marx, in fact, argued that pastoralists might be considered among the first capitalists ‘for the ori...