This article is getting to the point about the dangers of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) towards the environment and public health. The million-head hog farm in Vera Cruz in Mexico where the swine flu may have originated from is run by Smithfield, a corporation which is not a stranger to these kinds of situations.

In the U.S., as in much of the world, there is little regulation of occupational conditions or worker exposures in most high-density animal houses. The conditions of work … provide many opportunities for both worker infection and transfer to others in the community. With the exception of concerns about disposal of dead chickens during an outbreak, there has been minimal attention to animal-human interactions associated with the operation and management of broiler poultry houses. Many workers are provided little or no protective clothing or pportunities for personal hygiene or decontamination on-site. Our studies of poultry house workers in Maryland indicate that workers take their clothes home for washing. Thus, it is not surprising that increased risks of pathogen exposure and infections, both bacterial and viral, have been reported among farmers, their families, and farm workers at poultry and swine operations. [again, my emphasis]

Vera Cruz authorities are suddenly scrambling to deny any link between the Granjas Carroll confinements and the outbreak. Instead, they claim, the flu came from Asia. Say they’re right and the outbreak near the Granjas Carroll confinements is traced directly to an Asian source. Even under that scenario, as the Graham/Silbergeld paper shows, the globe’s rapidly growing meat industry is creating conditions for virulent pathogens, both viral and microbrial, to thrive. As they write:

Industrial-scale poultry production is expanding rapidly in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North Africa, and the Near East. Concerns have been raised over the relatively weak veterinary and public health infrastructure in some of these countries. Swine production is also increasing; for example, in China, pork production increased from 42 million tons to 51 million tons from 2001 to 2006. This increase is largely related to the expansion of the integrated or industrial model of production led by both national and multinational corporations for expanding markets of increasingly urban consumer populations within these countries as well as exports.

The results of this trend, in Chinese pork production, at least, driven in large part by Smithfield, threaten to be dire.

These new methods of food animal production generate many routes of pathogen transfer among wild and domesticated species and from animals to humans through occupational, peri-occupational, and environmental pathways. At the animal-human interface in these operations, there is inadequate protection of workers and their communities, and, more generally, there is incomplete biocontainment to prevent transfers from the animal house to the general environment.

So would all of this be an example of what economists mean by ‘externalities’?

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