As a biologist studying water quality, Dr. Eva Pip is concerned about Lake Winnipeg. The water sample she is holding in this photo, sampled by her University of Winnipeg students near a public beach last summer, is full of toxins, as she has demonstrated in her lab. Swallow a mouthful of this, Dr. Pip says, and you’d get very ill.
One of the courageous Canadian researchers I’ve had a chance to visit recently, Dr. Pip has for years been measuring and documenting high levels of toxins in Manitoba water. Last summer she found levels of the potentially lethal substance ‘microcystin’ at 400 times the allowable limit for human health. Thankfully the local beaches were closed at the height of the problem. But that’s no solution to pollution.
Lake Winnipeg, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, has a pathological level of algae, partly due to excessive chemical runoff from surrounding agriculture — largely intensive livestock operations (ILOs). One of the pork capitals of Canada, Manitoba has more pigs than people. The province has a human population of just over one million, yet there were eight million hogs produced in Manitoba in 2010, according to a a report called Manitoba Pig and Pork Industry 2010. And while the pigs/hogs are almost all kept in unnatural environments, crowded into factory farms, nonetheless nature calls to each of them each day to produce an amount of manure far beyond what can be useful fertilizer.
“If you say anything against ILOs, you’re considered to be anti-jobs and anti-business,” says Dr. Pip. But large-scale hog production is one of the main contributors to the pollution, she says.
Factory farming on the Canadian Prairies is one example of numerous food production systems that damage the environment. It illustrates the second of my Five Key Challenges for Food Systems outlined previously:
- To feed a large and growing world population
- To produce food ecologically
- To consume food for human health
- To act compassionately toward all living beings
- To support community well-being.
What can you and I do? We can cut back on our meat consumption, and thereby stop supporting intensive factory farming. We don’t need to eat meat several times a day, as do many Canadians. If, instead, we choose meat several times a week, we’ll be healthier personally and communally.
We can also talk with our politicians and other policy-makers to insist that they stop pushing large-scale, export-oriented industrial meat systems, and instead promote small-scale sustainable production of animal foods.
Intensive hog barns just south of Winnipeg, surrounded by black 'lagoons' of manure
One Response to “Five Key Challenges for Food Systems II”
Great article! Lets hope that at some point reality will force people to quit denying the facts and start to make the changes necesary to preserve mankind, because lets face it the planet will survive without us. We are not destroying the planet we are destroying human life on the planet. Yes we are altering the planet but it will continue on just fine without us once we are gone, better in fact I would think.