African Journalist Addresses Animal Welfare

This is a moving and insightful article about animal welfare in the developing world. The author is Jack Meena, a journalist based in Tanzania.

In the article, Meena also discusses the growing threat of agrobusiness in developing countries. This concerns me deeply. As reform of factory farms progress in developed countries, these practices will simply be transplanted and "outsourced" to developing countries desperate for the economic growth. Traditional animal husbandry will be supplanted by the crueler industrialization of meat production.

Asia, South America and Africa are now becoming major growth areas for the development of factory farming. This growth is often supported and encouraged by western agri-business interests.

Livestock production worldwide continues to grow and is tending to move from extensive marginal land use and mixed cropping to industrial or factory farming. Nowhere is this expansion more marked than in developing countries.

According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa will be the world’s leading producers of animal products by 2020 and much of that meat will be produced in industrial systems (Delgado, 1999).

Photo by endaf.