By Tom Smith, Newport West LP member
On March 2nd the Daily Telegraph carried a statement from the US ambassador to the UK, who urged that Britain should embrace American farming methods to seal a transatlantic trade deal. He said that chlorine-washed chicken and feeding growth hormones to cattle was the ‘farming of the future’.
It should be noted that certain US intensive farming products and techniques, including the use of pesticides, have actually been banned in many parts of the world. However, we have a Tory government aiming for a hard Brexit and poised to welcome the same banned products and methods that threaten the health of people in this country.
Manifesto commitments abandoned
As usual, the Tories have betrayed their own manifesto commitment to UK farmers. Even in January it pledged not to lower food standards. This was a blatant lie of course. On May 13th, May Boris and Liz Truss tossed the promise into the bin, as a Labour amendment to the Agriculture Bill, insisting that all future food imports have to be produced to the same standards as practised currently in the UK, was defeated by 51 votes. The Bill is so bad that even 22 Tory MPs voted for the amendment.
The threat to animal welfare standards is important. The National Farmers Union has launched a petition that to date has gained a million signatures.
Jimmy Doherty, a TV presenter and farmer, wrote in the Daily Mail that chlorinated chicken and hormone-pumped beef would make a mockery of British farming standards. Farmers will go out of business in the UK if they are forced to compete with US imports on price alone. There will be pressure on them to lower their own production and animal welfare standards to US levels.
We know that the EU would never accept food production standards beneath those currently in the EU, and the possibility of US-produced food entering the EU through the Irish land border makes a ‘hard border’ more likely. Since the talks between the US and UK are being held in secret, it is clear that the slogan of “following the science” is being conveniently ditched.
Rodent hair, mould and insect eggs
Meanwhile, the Food and Drugs Administration in the US hardly fills one with confidence. It claims that it is impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally-occurring defects.
What is meant by this is that rodent hair, insect eggs, mould, animal faeces, fruit flies and maggots are all permitted in American food products. So you can have 4 per cent of a tin of cherries being maggot. You can further enjoy one maggot or five fly eggs in a tin of fruit juice. Or how about you feast on five fly eggs and one maggot in every 100 grams of tomato paste? Then you can round it off with up 20 maggots in a hundred grams of drained mushrooms. One report concluded that the average American consumes one to two pounds of so-called ‘defects’ every year and, naturally, they didn’t have a clue what they are eating.
In the USA, ractopamine is a drug that is pumped into pigs. Reports show that sixty to eighty percent of American farms use it drug to enhance growth. It is associated with pigs being unable to walk and with hoof deformities. It is banned in over 200 countries as posing a threat to human health.
Chicken ‘litter’ is a combination of chicken manure, dead chickens, feathers and spiller ploughed into cattle feed. It is banned in the EU. In the USA, hormones that are pumped into cattle are thought to be carcinogenic, and these too are banned in the EU. There are concerns about foot and mouth disease and BSE in US cattle.
Appalling conditions for animal breeding
Antibiotics are pumped into cattle, chickens and turkeys in the USA. This adds to the threat to human health by promoting antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is a growing world problem.
All of these drugs are used to compensate for the most appalling conditions in which animals are bred in American intensive farms.
Slaughtered chickens are washed with chlorinated water, precisely because of the appallingly bad sanitary conditions in which the chickens are reared, not that the ‘chlorination’ does much beyond a ‘cosmetic’ sterilisation of the carcass. Research by Southampton university has shown that chlorine washing makes it impossible to detect Listeria and Salmonella, two highly dangerous bacteria that proliferate in poor poultry breeding, but such washing gives the impression that the chicken is safe when it is not. My own research suggests that in the USA over eighty different chemical additives are used in animal rearing for meat, many of which are banned around the world.
Labelling regulations will be loosened
In the UK we currently have the traffic light system to guide us with food product purchases. We also have the ‘country of origin’ labelled. The Americans will consider this as a barrier to trade – and that isn’t surprising, because if there is a UK/US trade deal, many people will not want to buy US meat products. So, it is likely that as part of any deal, labelling regulations will be loosened and we will end up the same as the Americans, eating blind.
The net result is that that Americans have a 1 in 6 chance of getting food poisoning, compared to a 1 in 66 chance in the UK.
I notice that Tory MP Liam Fox has crawled back into the public spotlight as UK representative to the World Trade Organisation. At the moment the WTO cannot function because of Trump’s failure to appoint US judges on arbitration committees. But Fox has gone on record to say that any ban on chlorinated chicken would be illegal.
The key point here is that socialists should have no faith in the WTO or any food standards organisations to keep workers safe. We should defend the interests of small farmers, small shops and fishermen and the labour movement, supported by scientists and specialists, should be in charge of food standards and farming practices. A socialist policy would involve the nationalisation of land and supermarkets so that only first-class products get to consumers.
This whole issue of farming, land and food production – and its relationship to the environment and global warming – is something that the socialist movement needs to embrace and discuss. In a nutshell, we can never be safe under capitalism as virus outbreak Is in chicken factories and meat packer organisations has shown.
It is notable that animal welfare does not feature very much in any World Trade Organisation regulations, so the USA is able to contest governments that prohibit American farm production on those grounds. SOIL is the leading campaigning group, including farmers and consumers, that is determined to defend UK farmers.
June 29, 2020
