Intensified animal production - factory farming - has brought its own problems: widespread diseases that have developed new levels of virulence and antibiotic resistance and skyrocketing rates of food poisoning. Foodborne illness in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control, now kills 9,000 people a year. UK reported cases of food poisoning rose 500 per cent between 1988 and 1998. Animal husbandry, the relationship between the producer and the domestic food animal, has been replaced by levels of animal suffering without historical precedent.
Alongside all this, subsidies to 'efficient' modern intensive agriculture have never been higher in Europe or the US. The real cost to the taxpayer of subsidies and cleaning up the mess intensive agriculture causes is estimated to be equal to 40 per cent on the average family's food bill, or about £30 per week.
Pesticide usage creates alarming figures. In 1990, the WHO estimated that there were 3 million acute pesticide poisonings in the developing world, of which 220,000 were fatal. Revised figures indicate 25 million poisoning cases. In the US 20,000 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide poisoning every year. Pesticides and herbicides 'bioaccumulate' moving up the food chain, often ending up in mothers' milk.
The destruction of habitat by monoculture reduces environmental niches. Extinction is the result, perhaps even of species that have not yet been discovered. Communities themselves suffer extinction in the face of intensification. Rural population declines, communities and the businesses that serve them collapse.
