The next pandemic might come from a factory farm in China or the US. Is the world prepared?
- Modern intensive farming could well be a cause of future pandemics. As the world’s appetite for meat grows, the food industry is contributing to the overuse of antibiotics, and turbocharging the spread of antibiotic-resistant diseases
But as the global pandemic puts in jeopardy America’s supply of steaks and burgers, those iconic American dietary birthrights, so Trump’s meat industry crisis might, for many in the world, be a welcome warning of the fundamental unsustainability of the meat industry worldwide.
Over the past two decades, increasing numbers of health experts have raised the alarm over the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Hong Kong’s own Dr Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, when she was head of the World Health Organisation, was vocal among them: “In the absence of urgent corrective and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, kill unabated.”
In the US, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that 2.8 million Americans get antibiotic-resistant infections every year, and 35,000 people die from them, adding billions to the country’s medical costs.
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Over the past century, first penicillin and then antibiotics like tetracycline and amoxicillin have played a huge role in suppressing illnesses from Lyme disease and syphilis to pneumonia and tuberculosis. But no new class of antibiotics has been discovered in the past four decades, making the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) annually more alarming.
The British government’s national action plan for the AMR crisis, published in January 2019, reported that 700,000 people were dying worldwide every year because antibiotics were losing their effectiveness, and that this number would rise to 10 million a year by 2050, with a cumulative cost of US$100 trillion, if firm action was not taken.
The report predicted that even with strong restrictions, the total consumption of antimicrobials would triple by 2030. It laid plans to reduce human use of antimicrobials in Britain by 15 per cent by 2024, and cut animal use by 25 per cent by this year, but there has been no subsequent report on progress.
More worryingly, the big increases in future use are expected to arise in China (30 per cent of global use by 2030), and in a clutch of developing economies that don’t even yet appear in the rankings – like Myanmar, Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru.
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One interesting result of the meat industry crisis in the US appears to have been an explosion of people experimenting with plant-based meat alternatives like Impossible Foods or OmniPork.
That seems impressive, but remember that the global meat industry was worth about US$946 billion in 2018, according to Statista, and is forecast to rise to U$1.14 trillion by 2023. So what might seem like good progress for vegans with a penchant for meaty textures is unlikely to make much of a dent in the global meat industry in general, or its antibiotic addiction in particular.
In view of Europe’s 2022 ban, that might seem like pragmatic good sense, but it is worth remembering that an increasing number of carnivores are willing to pay a price premium for meat from animals that have been raised more humanely, so there may be profits in the shift.
But at the end of the day, as we observe the chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, I remain sceptical about our ability to anticipate and respond appropriately to the next animal-originated pandemic, and about our capacity to either cut factory farming or fight the food industry’s antibiotic addiction.
After all, the main drivers of factory farming – and the appetite for meat – are relentless population growth and rising wealth. Our food industry may be sincere in its good intentions, but are good intentions not what paved the road to Hell?
David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view