This legislation gets at an important fact: agriculture's environmental harm & animal cruelty are shaped and worsened by labor exploitation, so (counter-intuitively) improving labor rights & protections is essential to protect environment & animals *as well as* people. Thread:
Short version: farmers. Farms tend to have a very low profit margin, and the more farmers are squeezed by low agricultural prices, the more they're forced/incentivised to reduce costs and increase yield by any means necessary, even if those means are unsafe, harmful, or cruel 2/?
In recent years a larger portion of agricultural produce is being bought by a few or, in some markets, *one* large monopoly buyer, the giant food (or wool etc.) processors who supply cheap food to giant chain grocery store networks etc. 3/?
And as always with monopoly buyers, they can then offer extremely low prices and farmers don't have much other option unless they want to try the (risky and uncertain) path of trying to set up their own distribution through a local CSA. 4/?
This creates situations like this year when the price offered for wool in the UK was actually *less* than it costs to shear the sheep, resulting in a net loss for the farm, which is common for other farming too (as the link at the top discusses) farmersguide.co.uk/2020/06/sharp-… 5/?
When farmers are squeezed like that, it strongly incentivizes reducing costs, squeezing every penny out of what they spend to *produce* in order to try to get to at least break even and support themselves, families etc. 6/?
Capitalist market forces are supposed to do this, encouraging efficiency and innovation to reduce costs, but unfortunately when you've really squeezed, the ways to reduce costs tend to take the form of causing harm, to the land, environment, animals, and especially to people 7/?
It might mean using a cheaper but more destructive pesticide or fertilizer, cramming animals in more densely, using more destructive machinery, but all those things also tend to come along with also forcing the people in these industries into unsafe or precarious work 8/?
I mainly study fishing so my detailed examples are from the fishing industry but the parallels are very strong. Sometimes in the store you'll see salmon that's $9/lb sitting next to salmon that's $22/lb and it's hard to understand why. Here's the breakdown 9/?
Data from @SitkaShares fishery: eco-friendly fishing methods add $1.80/lb to their fishing costs; tracking fish to be sure it's really the fish we think it is $0.55/lb; eco-friendly packaging & carbon neutrality $1.35/lb; eco-total $3.70 That turns $9 into $14 but not $22 10/?
Where do the other costs come from? Being humane toward *humans*. Cheap fish producers keep costs down by shipping fish to China to be processed w/ low wages, few labor protections, & fewer safety/hygiene regulations 11/?
Choosing to process fish in the USA, paying workers a living wage, offering safe conditions, & protecting consumers from unsafe practices & chemicals or contaminants adds $2.17/lb to the cost of @SitkaShares fish, getting our $14 eco-friendly fish up to ~$16 but there's more 12/?
They also spend ~$1.65/lb "paying fishermen fairly" i.e. promising a fair price for fish *in advance* and paying that price *even if* market prices go down & market giants are paying much less. The cost of protecting fishermen & families from constant fear of bankruptcy 13/?
So our $9 cheap fish is +$3.70 for eco-friendly methods, and +$3.82 for human-friendly methods (worker & consumer protections & guarding producers from economic precariousness); our fish is now $16.62/lb and protecting people costs about the same as protecting Earth/animals 14/?
Our $16.62/lb fish then gets up to $20 or $22 if it's an extra-desirable species, demand is high, or (often) from the markups of the retailer (who also needs to pay workers fairly), but that's after it leaves the fisherman's hands, equivalent of leaving the farmer's hands. 15/?
So, when the market is dominated by giant distributors who've consolidated into near monopolies (same process as tech becoming Big Tech), and these giants won't pay $16.62 per lb. for fish, or equivalent fair prices for eggs, wool, pork, berries etc., farmers are squeezed 16/?
The options are to cut costs or else go bankrupt, but cost-cutting here means doing harm. Some is harm to workers, some to consumers, some to animals, some to the environment, but the same pressures incentivise them all. 17/?
Thus it makes *tons* of sense to address these problems together, w/ an integrated regulation package recognizing that agricultural harm has many victims but one root cause, and incentivizing humane treatment of farmers, factory workers, consumers, animals, & Earth as one. 18/18
