Live export figures reveal the extent of the EU’s hypocrisy
An analysis of new data from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has revealed the EU to be the biggest exporter of live animals. But what is larger - our sense of surprise or the scale of the EU’s hypocrisy regarding animal welfare?
The export of live animals has long been one of the most contentious issues of animal agriculture and international trade, touching on issues ranging from animal welfare and mismatching legislation to corrupt subsidies and unfair tariffs. But if you were to guess the biggest exporter of animals across international borders, who would you pick? China, India or the US perhaps? If you said any of those, you would be wrong, according to the latest figures from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
In a recent analysis of the FAO’s 2019 data, the Guardian revealed that the European Union could be responsible for as much as 80 per cent of the global trade in live farm animals worth an estimated $20 billion (£14 billion) a year. Pigs, sheep, cows, fish and chickens are among the billions of animals each year that make up a lucrative, often subsidised trade that evidently cares little for animal welfare despite whatever so-called standards may be present domestically in each exporting EU state.
Take for example Romania, which exports sheep to the Middle East and North Africa and is able to keep prices lower compared to locally reared sheep thanks to EU subsidies, which as we know come from the contributions each member state makes to the EU budget and ultimately out of the pockets of taxpayers. Agricultural subsidies in and of themselves are cause enough for concern, with the New York Times writing in 2019 that $65 billion was paid out each year as part of a “subsidy system that is deliberately opaque, grossly undermines the European Union’s environmental goals and is warped by corruption and self-dealing” with large portions going to a powerful few, rather than the everyday farmers they claim to help.
As one of the EU’s 27 member states, Romania is subject to EU-wide legislation regarding the treatment of animals, not that any such standard could ever go far enough when all animals die the same way for human consumption regardless of laws. However, for the EU to claim that its legislation is “one of the most advanced in the world” also betrays its greatest hypocrisy.
For how can it be true that the EU states treat animals well while also sending them to countries that have no such standards and often on long journeys that place animals under enormous stress verging on torture. This includes pigs, who cannot sweat and are prone to suffocation due to overcrowding, prolonged hunger and thirst on journeys of up to eight hours on lorries such as those from Denmark to the UK, or in the cargo holds of planes from France to China.
Slaughterhouses in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon have been exposed for unparalleled levels of animal cruelty, and are among the export markets for a number of EU states, plus at least one NGO that works to improve slaughterhouse conditions operates in Turkey, a candidate member of the EU. Again, with there being no such thing as ‘humane slaughter’ when no animal would choose to die in any way, welfare standards are almost an irrelevance, but they are important to politicians looking to score points and to consumers hoping to absolve themselves of the guilt many of them feel for paying for the lives of sentient beings to be taken for no good reason other than liking the way they taste. This gross consumption of animals is applicable to most people living in the developed and comparatively rich nations that constitute the EU, for whom there is ready access to varied and affordable plant-based foods.
Speaking to the Guardian, Peter Stevenson, chief policy adviser of campaign group Compassion in World Farming, said: “There are international laws on animal welfare at slaughter set by the World Organisation for Animal Health, and we should not be sending animals to places where we know they are being broken.” Stevenson went on to say that “the slaughterhouses he had seen in the Middle East were the worst he had seen.”
“If so-called ‘humane’ slaughter was so important, can it really be used as an enabler for eating animals when the regulations by which it is judged are a complete sham?”
While the UK is no longer in the EU post-Brexit, we do still claim to have standards that are the envy of the world according to British farmers and industry organisations such as the AHDB and the NFU. And while the UK government plans to ban live exports such as those that transport some 60,000 sheep and calves each year via Ramsgate where activists hold justifiably angry protests, in 2017 the UK was in the top ten importing countries for live animals, bringing in around 500,000 animals, mostly pigs from Ireland. This does not look set to change, and equally the ban does not apply to chickens, so while we may not be sending animals away we are still culpable in that we’re fuelling the trade as customers.
Obviously, loopholes abound, with live exports from the UK set to continue from Northern Ireland which according to Defra “will continue to follow EU legislation on animal welfare in transport for as long as the Northern Ireland protocol is in place”, while the UK’s export of chicks in the tens of millions each year amounted to an industry worth £139 million in 2018.
Morally, even if there was a global ban on live exports and no animal crossed a border, it would not change the fact that sentient individuals are dying unnecessarily. The numbers are also beyond comprehension when even one animal dying for human consumption is one too many. But if so-called ‘humane’ slaughter was so important, can it really be used as an enabler for eating animals when the regulations by which it is judged are a complete sham? With live export such a massive business that is driven by financial gain with no real regard for animals, can consumers really use standards to justify eating their flesh, their eggs and their secretions? The answer to that is distressingly obvious.
Andrew Gough is Media & Investigations Manager for Surge.
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