2y ago

France pushes for more factory farming in food U-turn

www.theguardian.com

Comments by agriculture minister seem to signal shift away from focus on organic produce as shoppers choose cheaper meat

16 comments

F%&k productivism. We shouldn't push for lower quality to match inflation, we should keep the same quality and lower the volume. It would be a win-win for people and the environment. Nobody needs to binge tons of meat all year long.
- Yeah, but that doesn’t bring out votes of the perceived quality of life decreases.
  I’d love to see meat prices keeping increasing, but you also need the other prices to keep being accessible.
  
  Producing fewer animal products makes it way easier to produce more plant-based products, both because farming subsidies can be reduced massively and because of all the space freed up previously used to produce animal feed.
  
  Half the farmland is used to produce feetstock for meat. So you cut meat prodcution you end up with more land for other crops.
  
  Yes because quality of life = purchasing power now
Cheap meat needs to not be a choice, period. It's a purely modern aberration.
- Meat only for the rich.
  
  That's already the case today. It's just that generally-speaking, Europeans fall into the rich category.
  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-consumption-vs-gdp-per-capita
  Meat consumption vs. GDP per capita, 2020
The next step has to be more sweatshops and some slave colonies. Maybe invade a country for cheap oil. Keeps the labor costs down.
The only real brexit benefit has been to gtfo out of the production subsidy debacle that is the CAP
It takes the largest slice of the budget and the 'modern' farming methods it promotes are destroying habitats and biodiversity
This is the best summary I could come up with:
France is urging its farmers to produce more cut-price meat in a major U-turn on factory farming, with inflation hammering demand for organic pork, beef and chicken.
Green algae from nitrates in fertilisers and waste from the region’s intensive pig, poultry and dairy farming have been linked to a number of deaths on its beaches.
But Macron’s wish to steer Europe’s biggest beef producer upmarket appears to have foundered, with 11% food inflation pushing shoppers to snub organic for cheaper meat.
Only “30% of French people now have the means to pay more for quality”, compared with half the population six years ago, said Pascale Hébel, a consumption analyst for data consultants C-Ways.
“Our goal is the reconquest of standard production,” said Gilles Huttepain, a top executive at poultry giant LDC and one of the leaders of industry group Anvol.
Under pressure from the government, supermarkets and animal welfare groups, France had almost turned its back on intensively farmed eggs, with only one in four coming from chickens reared in cages.
The original article contains 535 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Fuckin’ yikes.

16 comments