Trump Is Bailing Out Big Meat—and Further Screwing the Planet
https://newrepublic.com/article/157913/trump-bailing-big-meatand-screwing-planet
critics who track the U.S. agricultural industry’s massive environmental footprint, the produce stage props seemed disingenuous: The stimulus will prop up a U.S. agricultural system in which more than two-thirds of crops become animal feed. The ultimate winners will be industrial meat companies like Cargill and Tyson. That’s disastrous news for the climate.
In 2018, watchdog groups GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy estimated that the world’s
top five industrial meat and dairy companies—JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, and Fonterra—were together releasing more emissions than fossil fuel companies like Exxon. Factory farms have contributed to a 14.4 percent spike in climate-destabilizing U.S. methane emissions since 1990, EPA calculations suggest, while at the same time leaking tens of millions of tons of raw sewage into the country’s waterways. And that’s before you get to their other potential public health issues.
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Much of this pollution can be traced back to a small group of powerful businesses such as Cargill, which is the largest privately held company in the United States, bigger even than Koch Industries. “They run agriculture,” Patty Lovera, a policy adviser for the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, told me, referring to the factory-farming giants. “They run the supply chain.” And the current stimulus contains no provisions for changing that. “Overall, it’s more subsidies to lock in the meat-based U.S. agriculture system,” said Glenn Hurowitz, executive director of the Washington, D.C.–based environmental watchdog group Mighty Earth. “That could be locking in polluting practices for much longer.”
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a recurring pattern under the Trump administration: play up the optics of supporting small farmers while mostly assisting atmosphere-warming corporations. That’s what happened with the $28 billion program announced in May 2019 to mitigate the impact of Trump’s trade wars. “What was meant to be a financial lifeline for struggling farmers,” The New York Times reported in February, “has been widely derided by critics as a corporate bailout for big agriculture companies and those who live in metropolitan areas but own farms in rural America.”
One of the larger beneficiaries of that trade war bailout has been the U.S. subsidiary of JBS, which received $67 million
The Brazil-based company is the largest meat-processing firm on the planet. The annual emissions linked to its business model—which relies on suppliers clear-cutting sections of the Amazon rain forest for cattle grazing—amount to 280 megatons of greenhouse gases, according to 2017 calculations from the Climate Accountability Institute.
Factory-farming meat giants have largely avoided the climate scrutiny given to oil and gas companies. “I think agriculture is a huge blind spot for the climate community,” Hurowitz said. “We need to decarbonize energy, don’t get me wrong, but acting on agriculture is at least as urgent.”
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“These companies depend on cheap corn and soy,” Lovera told me. “If there wasn’t [federal support] to prop up farmers to return next year and overproduce corn and soy cheaply again that could be disruptive.”
And this in turn perpetuates a highly destructive agricultural system. Squeezing thousands of animals into small spaces on factory farms means creating massive manure-storing lagoons. The expansion of this model is one reason why U.S. manure-related emissions have grown 66 percent since 1990. Ironically, farmers are already feeling the effects of climate change, including hundreds of millions of dollars in uninsured crop losses from record Midwestern flooding last year.
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