We’ve all grown accustomed to the
steady parade of television ads—$3
billion year worth, by some
estimates— urging us to “ask our
doctors” about the latest miracle drug.
Pharmaceutical ads have been commonplace
since the 1990s, after the U.S. Food &
Drug Administration (FDA)
cleared the way for prescription
drug companies to aggressively market
their wares directly to consumers.
Wisdom and ethics aside, it’s easy to
see why Big Pharma would push pills to
humans, to treat human ailments. It’s
big money.
But a drug company that makes animal
drugs, purchased not by consumers but by
factory farms, advertising direct to
consumers who will never actually
purchase those drugs? How does that make
sense?
If you’re Elanco, the $2.3-billion
animal drug division of Eli Lilly, you
make it seem sensible by spinning the
message. In Elanco’s case, the message
is this: Without our animal drugs, the
world will starve.
It’s a message that paints the drug
maker as an altruistic savior, instead
of the profit-motivated animal abuser
and public health threat it actually is.
Massaging the Messaging
It’s been about a year since I
accidentally stumbled on Elanco’s ENOUGH
Movement
campaign. Curious as to why a
corporation that pushes animal drugs
would spend millions on a consumer
campaign, I “joined” the movement.
Since then, I’ve routinely received
emails from “The Movement.” The subject
lines generally go like this: “More
People, Improved Diets, ENOUGH Food” or
“When It Comes to Harvesting, Will We
Have ENOUGH?” or, one of my favorites,
“Pork: Can We Have ENOUGH?”
The messages are intended to evoke
fear—fear of scarcity, fear of hunger.
But these messages strike a different
kind of fear in the hearts of those who
know anything about the real causes of
hunger—poverty, poor distribution,
waste, climate instability.
The fact is, we
already produce enough food to feed
the world. And as research conducted by
the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization has
clearly shown, to achieve global
food security we need a “rapid and
significant shift from conventional
monoculture-based and high
external-input-dependent industrial
production toward mosaics of sustainable
regenerative production systems that
also considerably improve the
productivity of small-scale farmers.”
What we should really be afraid of is
the fact that drug use on factory farms
has led to a huge public health problem—antibiotic
resistance. In the U.S., at least 2
million people are infected with
antibiotic-resistant bacteria every
year, and at least 23,000 die as a
result,
according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
Not to mention that animals pumped with
drugs like ractopamine, banned in China,
the European Union and more than 100
other countries—but not here in the
U.S.—suffer and become ill. Yet we still
turn them into meat for human
consumption.
Good ENOUGH for U.S. Consumers
In October (2015), mainstream business press got wind of Elanco’s ENOUGH Movement. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Andrew Martin wrote a piece exposing the campaign, and its near-evangelical spokesperson, Jeff Simmons, president of Elanco. Martin wrote:
Simmons is on a counteroffensive. Increasingly, the drugs Elanco makes—including antibiotics and productivity enhancers—have come under attack by food activists and, in some instances, scientists and regulators. Food companies and fast-food chains are responding to consumer demand for healthier, more natural food that doesn’t contain some of the drugs that have made Elanco a $2.3 billion business.
Elanco,
the animal-health division of the pharma
giant Eli Lilly, makes one of the
world's most controversial
growth-promoting chemicals for meat
production: ractopamine, marketed as
Optaflexx for cattle,
Paylean for pigs, and
Topmax for turkeys.
A member of the class of medicines known
as beta-agonists, which are also given
to asthmatic people to help relax their
airway muscles, ractopamine makes
animals rapidly put on lean weight—but
it also mimics stress hormones and makes
their hearts beat faster. Studies
suggest that it makes livestock
more vulnerable to heat. Ractopamine
is banned in the
European Union,
China, and more than 100 other
countries, and it faces mounting
criticism here in the United States.
So controversial is ractopamine, that
according to PoliticoPro, China recently
agreed to resume imports of U.S. pork
from six processing plants and eight
cold storage facilities, only after
those plants and facilities pledged to
not to process hogs raised with
ractopamine. PoliticoPro quoted a U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA)
official as saying: "This will allow a
greater share of U.S. pork and product
exports to China in the coming months."
What the official didn’t say? We’ll save
the ractopamine-laced pork for consumers
here in the U.S.
And what about those consumers who don’t
want ractopamine, or any other
unnecessary drugs, in their meat?
Simmons told
BloombergBusinessweek his message is
this:
...that a minority of pushy elites—vegans, organic die-hards, and GMO-bashers—is keeping vital technology from farmers, that animal protein is a crucial source of nutrition, that unleashing innovation would allow farmers to produce enough meat, milk, and eggs to meet demand without draining additional natural resources.
To which we say, hogwash. And ENOUGH,
already.
Katherine Paul is associate director
of the
Organic Consumers Association.
https://www.organicconsumers.org/blog/drugging-animals-factory-farms%E2%80%94enough-already