HERD ABOUT IT?

by Ana Grarian

Ana’s readers have listened as Ana has described and complained about Industrial Livestock Operations and their inhumane treatment of livestock. That’s LIVE stock. Living, breathing, thinking animals. Ana has also pointed out some of the problems this type of production presents for humans. Consumers, workers, neighbors and communities. This link to the trailer for PIG BUSINESS is a film about the process and problem with intensive, confinement, hog production. The complete film is available on You Tube.

Ana thanks Ms. Worcester heartily for her fine work.

A Film by Tracy Worcester

From the Director’s page:

“This film shows the pork industry as just one example of the corporate take over that affects every sector of our economy. Factory farmed pork is only cheap because the corporate producer has externalised the true costs onto the broader community. Locals suffer from the polluted water and air but we are all effected when the power wielded by big business destroys democracy and crushes free speech by intimidation.

By avoiding pork from corporations and investing that money in human scale production, we are revitalising small farms and their farm shops, farmers markets and local butchers. If shopping in the supermarket we must seek out labels that indicate British and outside bred and reared or free range on straw bedding

The message is also to press politicians who protect our farmers against comparatively cheap pork imports so that UK pig farmers are not forced into a down ward spiral of ever poorer animal welfare standards and pollution to compete. Legeslation for better food labelling legislation for accuracy and legibility is essential.

Once UK farmers are protected from cheap imports, consumers can help farmers raise standards and factory farms will become uneconomic

All of the issues in the film from animal cruelty to human rights are being confronted by a plethora of campaigners all over the world. However, if we simply treat symptoms of breakdown as individual problems we are shifting chairs on the titanic.

I hope this film will show how the root cause of disparate problems is the centralisation of power into the hands of giant banks and corporations. Until we reclaim power back to the community and nation state ie our democracy, we are enslaved.

Disempowered, we watch while everything we hold dear is stolen and our planet plundered. Exponential economic growth means more for a few at the expense of many. Support local production for local consumption to reclaim our world from the corporate stranglehold.

I have made a feature documentary called PIGS! that investigates the operations of the multinational company, Smithfield Foods of American, the largest pig producer and processor in the world. It reveals the dark under belly of the food industry the impact on those who work in it, those who live near it, those who eat the pork and the impact on the animals themselves. But it also tells the story of what is happening in the Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism, as EU tax payers fund multinational companies to take over the old state owned industries. It is a film which will strike a chord with supermarket shoppers in America and Europe. The brilliant lawyer, writer (best seller Crimes Against Nature) and founder of Waterkeepers Alliance, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, and I are the main protagonists in the film.”