Archives: Reports

The Trans-Atlantic Plastics Pipeline: How Pennsylvania’s Fracking Boom Crosses the Atlantic

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Food

America’s oil and gas rush is now coming to Europe, polluting both sides of the pond, contributing to climate change and threatening coastal wildlife.

Over the past decade, the U.S. fossil fuel industry has surged by employing new techniques and technologies that combine horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) to extract oil and gas from shale and other underground rock formations.

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Fracking causes many negative public health and environmental impacts and injects large quantities of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to release oil or gas tightly held in rock layers.

European countries must protect the environment and public health and reject America’s headlong rush to fracking and cracking pollution and environmental damage.

¿UN PAÍS PARA CERDOS?

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Food

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La industria española del porcino supone el 37 por ciento del total de la producción ganadera, y el 14 por ciento de la producción agraria total, generando alrededor de 6 millones de euros en 2014.

España es el tercer mayor exportador mundial de porcino, detrás de China y Estados Unidos, tras convertirse en 2015 en el principal exportador de la Unión Europea (UE), por delante de Alemania y Dinamarca. En ese mismo año, España
alcanzó también el mayor censo de la UE, con 28.3 millones de cerdos. Mientras que otros productores europeos reducen su producción, España la incrementa, así como sus exportaciones, como resultado de una industria con un alto nivel de integración y con los costes de producción más reducidos entre los principales países productores de la UE.

SPAIN, TOWARDS A PIG FACTORY FARM NATION?

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Food

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Spain is the third largest exporter of pork after China and the United States and has the largest pig population in the EU, 28,3 million animals.

Production and exports are growing as a result of high industry integration and low production costs. But that means that the industry is getting concentrated in just a few hands, with the number of farms diminishing rapidly and farmers facing growing marginalization. And this industry is not being held accountable for its impacts on the environment, workers and communities.

Fracking and the Food System

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WaterFood

FoodandWaterEuropeFrackingFoodThe oil and gas industry likes to promote fracking as a boon to farmers and rural communities, but the dream often turns into a nightmare. In the United States, fracking has polluted water wells, sickened people and livestock, and reduced available farmland — proving that fracking and a healthy food system are not compatible.

As seen in the United States, the rapid expansion of oil and gas fracking has created significant environmental and public health problems.

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Many of these problems are inherent to the practice and cannot be avoided through regulation, which is why fracking should be banned.

Find out more about why we need to:

  • Move past the false promises of the oil and gas industry
  • Invest in economic development in rural communities that safeguards our food and water
  • Develop policies that allow farmers to make a fair living farming on their land, rather than resorting to leasing their farms for polluting energy production.

Antibiotics Resistance 101

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Food

Food & Water Europe Stop Giving Antibiotics to Healthy AnimalsTetracycline. Penicillin. Amoxicillin. Antibiotics are life-saving tools in our medicine chest, but we all have good reason to worry that we’re losing them. Bacteria that make us sick are adapting to resist even our best drugs, so when we get sick it’s harder to find a medicine to help us get well. Medical authorities call it one of the most serious risks to global human health.

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It’s happening now. At least 25,000 patients in the EU each year die from multidrug-resistant bacteria at a cost of at least an extra €1.5 billion per year. In the United States, these infections make at least 2 million people sick each year, and at least 23,000 of them lose their lives.

It’s inevitable that bacteria will continue to get stronger in this way. It’s how nature works. It’s only sensible to do everything we can to make sure our medicines work as well as they can for as long as possible.

That’s where factory farms come in. Routine, low-dose misuse of antibiotics to boost profits on crowded, stressful factory farms drives the creation and spread of resistant bacteria. This means that we all may be exposed to, and pay the price for, the dangerous bacteria produced by factory farming even if we don’t eat meat or live near a farm.

You may have heard about MRSA infections in hospitals, but it’s on our farms, too. The “R” stands for RESISTANT, and that’s what makes it dangerous, so it’s bad news that it’s in our food. We even know that one strain of MRSA originated in humans, transferred to pigs where it became resistant to two drugs, and then jumped back to humans.

We can’t afford to wait.

Colistin used to be a veterinary drug, but it’s now a critically important medicine of last resort for people, used when other drugs fail. When bacteria with transferable resistance to colistin were found in meat and people in China in 2015, medical predictions said it would be three years before they reached the UK. We now know that the resistant bacteria were already in Europe since at least 2012, but weak monitoring didn’t pick them up.

Many livestock producers and fish farmers use antibiotics appropriately when their animals are sick, but it’s just crazy to keep giving these precious drugs to animals that don’t need them. Food & Water Europe is fighting to stop it.

Fracking Business (as Usual)

FoodWaterEuropeFriendsofEarthFrackingBusinessa.jpg

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Fracking is an extreme method of oil and gas extraction that involves pumping millions of litres of toxic fluid deep underground to fracture rocks and release oil and natural gas. The process can’t be done safely.

Research shows that fracking:

– pollutes the air we breathe
– makes our drinking water toxic
– worsens climate change, and
– makes people sick.

The environment and the health of citizens are not being protected by the EU guidelines on how member states carry out shale gas exploration and production finds Food & Water Europe and Friends of the Earth Europe.

Jointly developed by Friends of the Earth Europe and Food & Water Europe, this report says the European Commission’s Recommendations lack the ability to force member states to even make minimal changes to their shale gas regulations. They also rely too heavily on self-monitoring by the oil and gas industry to control the worst impacts of fracking.

As a result, the report says member states are exploiting the weaknesses of the Recommendations and are failing to take adequate precautionary steps against the potential risks of shale gas, including publishing the chemicals used, safely disposing of fracking waste water, and liability for abandoned oil and gas wells.

Fracking companies make exorbitant profits at the expense of local communities, which may be left without safe water. The solution is to ban fracking everywhere and implement an immediate halt to all unconventional fossil fuel projects in the EU.

Find out more in the report, ‘Fracking business (as usual)’.