The next pandemic might come from a factory farm in China or the US. Is the world prepared?

It should come as no surprise that a burger-lover like President Donald Trump has declared the United States’ crisis-hit meat industry as “critical infrastructure”. More than 10,000 workers at 170 meatpacking plants have fallen victim to Covid-19, and many plants have temporarily shut. The meat giant Tyson Foods has warned that the US “food supply chain is breaking”.

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.

While the Covid-19 pandemic may have been linked to a squalid wildlife and seafood market in Wuhan, in central China, we should not forget that the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is thought to have originated in pig farms. Modern intensive farming is less a victim of the present global pandemic than the likely cause of future pandemics.

And, as concentrated animal feeding operations at the heart of modern intensive farming play a critical role in the propagation of zoonotic diseases – those spread from animals to humans – perhaps even more important is their role in the mass consumption of antibiotics, which has turbocharged the spread of diseases that are now resistant to antibiotics.

Humans today consume less than a quarter of all the antibiotics produced and sold. Over three-quarters are produced for the meat industry, in particular in China, the US and Brazil, for two main reasons: for metaphylaxis, to enable farm animals to survive their brief but drab lives in industry-scale farms; and to fatten them up faster, so they can reach slaughter weight more quickly and profitably.

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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That may not seem so many alongside the 100,000 that have died in the US this spring from Covid-19, but it is enough for the CDC to call antibiotic resistance one of the world’s most pressing public health problems.

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.

But progress in Britain – or in Europe for that matter, where a total ban on animal use of antimicrobials is due to come into force in 2022 – is of limited value, when according to the US’ National Academy of Sciences, the world’s biggest users of antibiotics in industrial farming are in China (23 per cent), the US (13 per cent) and Brazil (9 per cent).

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.

Nielsen reported a 264 per cent jump in US consumption in the nine weeks to May 2. And some are predicting that a global industry for plant-based alternatives to meat will grow to US$40 billion by 2025.

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.

Perhaps more impactful will be decisions being taken by some of the food giants not to go vegan, but to wean themselves off factory farming. Groups like Tyson, JBS and Cargill say they are taking steps to eliminate reliance on antibiotics, along with restaurant chains like McDonald's and KFC, which have begun to make commitments to phase out antibiotic use in healthy animals.

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