Diseases in farm animals cause economic shocks
In 2023 FAIRR estimated that similar outbreaks in the #High_Income_Countries/USA have resulted in approximately 40 million animal losses with economic costs ranging from $2.5 to $3 billion.
#High_Income_Countries/UK
Bird flu
Thought to have come from a Goose farm in China,
“If an industry can only remain by culling millions of animals it is not sustainable,” said Arjan Stegeman, professor of veterinary medicine and epidemiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
The UK had 491 outbreaks of bird flu alone October 2021 and September 2022
In 2022 Bird flu half the UK’s free range turkeys were culled in the latest avian flu outbreak, which is now killing vulnerable and rare wild birds across the UK. In an interview for the Independent, One small-scale farmer reported losing £1.2M in just one year from dead Turkeys. The Grocer magazine reported found that Christmas turkey prices in 2022 were 24% higher.
Ironically, despite the factory farms playing a key role in causing these diseases to emerge, it is small-scale, free range and high welfare systems also pay dearly. This is because they are less able to control how their animals are exposed.
The UN and FAO have admitted that that factory poultry farming is a key cause of HPAI. One study found that intensification of #China's poultry sector may have led to HPAI.
Sea lice
Sea lice prevents aquaculture being a food security silver bullet #fish/farmed
BSE and F&M
There are noticeable dips in #beef production in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, showing the effects of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and foot and mouth crises.
The numbers sold for beef dropped from 3.8 million to 2.4 million between 1995 to 1996 due to the impact of BSE on sales UK governmental food security review, 2021
US
At the time of writing (April 2024) The US is battling a HPAI outbreak that began in California more than 2 years ago. In the months following the outbreak, egg prices skyrocketed to an average retail price of
Intensively farmed livestock are particularly prone to disease outbreaks. They are densely packed, so disease travels easily. Selective breeding for higher output means they have less genetic diversity, meaning that a disease can be uniquely deadly to all animals in a farm. Finally, the low welfare conditions that intensively farmed animals are kept in are highly stressful, which can reduce their immune systems (see Mace and Knight, 2023 for a review).
China
Another disease that has caused large food security disruptions is the massive ASF outbreak that hit China starting in 2018. This epidemic led to the deaths or culling of around over 40% of the country's 143 million pigs. As with HPAI outbreaks, this caused large increases in food prices; pork prices doubled over the course of a year, but there were also spillover effects, with beef and chicken prices increasing as millions of consumers tried to substitute.
LMICs
However terrible the effects are for countries like the USA and China, effects on food security are limited, as families are able to substitute diseased products for other products to maintain adequate nutrition. Moreover, the governments of high income countries are able to compensate affected producers to protect them from poverty, and increase imports to ensure that food shocks are temporary. However, the governments of poorer nations are far less able to do take any of these measures. Testing for animal disease is often non existent and institutions are slow to react. This is a significant cause for concern as animal disease outbreaks can often kill up to 90% of the farm animals in a region in a matter of months, causing the collapse of food availability. Failure to contain outbreaks can also put neighbouring countries at risk. A 2006 outbreak of HPAI in Nigeria quickly spread across North and Central Africa, to Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo and even as far as Djibouti and Egypt. Intensively farming livestock in low and middle income countries thus carries significant food stability risks.
When animal diseases cause lost income and high food prices, food access suffers as a result. Governments in LMICs are unlikely to have the funding to compensate farmers, so disease outbreaks can result in the collapse of their income, plunging them further into poverty and compromising food access. Sometimes even the threat of these diseases can cause economic damage: the 2006 HPAI outbreak in North and Central Africa triggered consumer panic in Kenya even though no cases were confirmed, with the average poultry farmer seeing income losses of 65%. One study projected that if HPAI had reached Kenya, it could have increased stunting in Kenyan children by as much as 3.9 percentage points due to lost income and food.
The global nature of modern animal agriculture can mean that outbreaks in a single country destabilise food security around the world. A 2020 simulation estimated that as a result of the 2018 African Swine Flue epidemic in China, global swine production decreased 9–34% and global pork prices increased by 17 to 85% (depending on the country). These shocks impact the food availability of poorer countries more severely, as non-diseased meat gets bought up by richer countries. As many LMICs grow wealthier and become more connected to global markets, the risks of disease from intensive livestock production will increase rapidly. To protect the food availability, access and stability of their population, governments of developing nations will likely have to invest increasing amounts of their newfound wealth in the constant monitoring and fighting of farmed animal disease.
Reading i didn't get to do: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2023.1273417/full