WHO BENEFITS?
Who Benefits from this System
Vertical Integration:
Vertical integration is a management arrangement where several steps in the production and/or distribution of a product or service are controlled by a single company. This increases that company’s power in the marketplace. This allows them to profit from every level of food production without investing in permanent assets like land or losing money to unpredictable elements such as crop failure due to unpredictable weather or animal mortality: the farmers take all the risk and the companies receive the benefits"(Sustainable Table http://www.sustainabletable.org/859/industrial-livestock-production)
Health Problems:
The health problems that are associated with factory farms occur in both the workers and the animals that they are farming. Because of the horrible living conditions of the animals " factory farm owners routinely add low doses of antibiotics to animal feed"(Sustainable Table, http://www.sustainabletable.org/270/public-health) and this regular low dose of antibiotics allows for the stronger bacteria [to] survive, reproduce and pass their resistance to future generations"(Sustainable Table, http://www.sustainabletable.org/270/public-health) The people "who work in factory farms are routinely exposed to a range of hazards known to cause a variety of well-documented health problems, some of which may be irreversible"(Sustainable Table, http://www.sustainabletable.org/270/public-health).
The factory farm's conditions are unhealthy for everything involved but when something goes wrong, it is terrible for the environment as well: "A few years after this deregulation in 1995, Smithfield spilled more than twenty million gallons of lagoon waste into the New River in North Carolina. The spill remains the largest environmental disaster of its kind and is twice as big as the iconic Exxon Valdez spill six years earlier" (Foer, 2009, Slices of Paradise/Pieces of Shit. p. 58)
Distribution of World's Food
So, if there is enough food to feed everyone in the world, why is there still starving people in the world? The main reason, according to World Hunger, is poverty. People cannot afford to pay for food, so they do not eat: "The world produces enough food to feed everyone. The principal problem is that many people in the world still do not have sufficient income to purchase (or land to grow) enough food" (http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm#Number_of_hungry_people_in_the_world). That means that developed nations, nations with money, can affrod to eat, and to grow, food. The western or developed nations have the need for large amounts of food while the developing countries have little. The United Nations Environment Program stated that "every year, consumers in industrialized countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (222 million vs. 230 million tons)"("World Food Day", 2015). We waste more food than the entire continent of Africa uses every year.
Projections of the World's Growing Population
"The reason the food industry looks the way it does it because of the increase in population. In order to sustain the food industry we will need to double food production over the next 40 years. It is not just the growth of the population that is the problem but the great demand that today’s society has. It is more wanting rather than needing. This demanding attitude about food is putting great strain on the food industry". (What you eat impacts the world http://gse.publisher.ingentaconnect.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/content/glbj/2y6q7z). The problem ending the current food production methods is the amount of people in the world who rely on this agriculture for their income: "food production today sees over 1 billion people working in the sector. Therefore in order for us to change the face of the food industry it will directly effect all these people. It could be said that this is a huge factor as to why we have no see a great shift into a more sustainable food industry". If poverty is the number one reason for starvation, than changign one billion jobs throughout the world will only add to world's problem with food distribution. http://gse.publisher.ingentaconnect.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/content/glbj/2y6q7z
References:
2015 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics. (2015, November 10). Retrieved from Http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn /world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm#Number_of_hungry_people_in_the_world
Foer, Jonathon Saffron. Eating Animals. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009. Print.
Sustainable Table (2015, November 9). Retrieved from http://www.sustainabletable.org/859/industrial-livestock-production)
World Food Day. (2015, November 25). Retrieved from http://www.worldfooddayusa.org/food_waste_the_facts.