Animal rights activists published an interactive map on Sunday revealing the locations of more than 27,500 farms and animal agriculture facilities, including 5,812 identified using satellite imagery, many of which do not appear in public records.
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Supermarket customers are paying more for beef than they have in decades during the coronavirus pandemic. But at the same time, the companies that process the meat for sale are paying farmers and ranchers staggeringly low prices for cattle.
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Janine Jackson interviewed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Ricardo Salvador about the coronavirus food crisis for the May 8, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Last week, an Intensive Care doctor in a central Florida hospital placed a call to Mexico to the parents of Juan Santiago (pseudonym) to inform them that their son was not expected to survive the next twenty-four hours. The next day, Juan, a farmworker from Immokalee, Florida, died from complications of the novel coronavirus.
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In January 2020, an estimated 10,000 chickens perished in a fire just west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The blaze spread quickly after reportedly activating exhaust fans in a poultry house managed by Mountaire Farms. Delaware-based Mountaire, the sixth-largest poultry company in the United States, pumps out tens of millions of pounds of ready-to-eat chicken each week.
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The Organic Consumers Association has sued Smithfield Foods Inc. in Superior Court for the District of Columbia over allegedly “deceptive food safety marketing representations about pork products.Smithfield, VA-based Smithfield Foods is accused of making marketing and advertising representations to convey to consumers, including consumers in the District of Columbia, that Smithfield brand pork products are the “safest” possible U.S. pork products.
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Unless you don’t know where your next meal is coming from – which is the case for some 800 million people, a number that could increase during the Covid-19 fallout – you’ve probably not thought this much about food before. Going to the supermarket is an ordeal. Your favourite restaurant is closed. Produce is rotting in the fields while unprecedented lines form at food banks.
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Could America’s small- to mid-sized meat processors pick up the lost capacity when large packers have to close? They might. But federal meat-inspection laws and regulations are standing in the way.
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It seems an oasis of good news in a desert of bad: Small farmers who saw restaurant sales evaporate and farmers’ market sales erode, in the wake of Covid-19, have found alternative ways to sell produce. They contribute to boxes sold by shuttered restaurants, sell their own boxes out of their trucks, even offer delivery. And they’re selling retail, not wholesale, so the money’s good.
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“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered.
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