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Taking on Pig Business

Tracy Worcester's fight against the excesses of industrial pig farming reaches Brussels.

Tracy Worcester has spent years campaigning against intensive pig farming -- see her powerful and disturbing film Pig Business on YouTube here -- and she has now taken her fight to Brussels.

Today, she and an alliance of MEPs are presenting evidence that European taxpayers are subsidising industrial farming -- and squeezing out more responsible, smaller-scale farms -- despite the worries over its effects on our health.

It all makes for grisly reading (put down your bacon buttie/sausage sandwich/lentil and pancetta soup before reading on). First, there's excessive antibiotic use. Flies and cockroaches around pig farms have been found to be resistant to the antibiotics routinely used there and the fear is that transmission to humans is also a possibility.

Then there was the scandal in Germany in January over cancer-causing chemicals (called dioxins) that were found in pig and chicken feed. This caused the closure of 1,000 pig and poultry farms and the destruction of 100,000 eggs, in an effort to stop the dioxins entering the food chain. Somewhat unhelpfully, one of the manufacturers involved was found to have hidden the full list of outlets it supplied, which one minister described as "a scandal within the scandal".

Finally, and perhaps most worryingly to animal welfare campaigners, research by the European Union suggests that 67 per cent of European pigs are housed in substandard, fully slatted systems, without straw in which to root, and up to 90 per cent have their tails docked illegally. Castration without anaesthetic and clipping of teeth also take place.

This (and more) has convinced a group of MEPs to use this summer's scheduled reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy to push for the greater regulation of pig farming and an end to subsidies for intensive farms. They have six "big asks", which include better labelling on pork products, higher welfare standards and a ban on prophylactic antibiotic use. There's also the small but important suggestion that all local and national bodies use only "high-welfare pork".

Pigs might not be the easiest animals to love but they're highly intelligent and therefore highly stressed by being kept in cramped, antisocial conditions. As it stands, farms that have high welfare standards are at a competitive disadvantage because the pork they produce costs more.

And, as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says here, that includes all British farms, because our welfare standards are higher than those of other countries. EU subsidies go to less well-regulated farms in places such as Poland and Romania, so we're paying to undermine our own progressive stance on welfare.

The EU has the power to change that. As Tracy Worcester puts it:

Now, lawmakers can decide for themselves if this industry should be allowed to continue to flood the EU with 'cheap', polluting, dangerous, socially and economically destructive and low welfare meat, while EU small farmers, who respect higher environmental, animal welfare and health standards, are struggling to survive.

If you're short of time, there's a ten-minute version of "Pig Business" available here.