Pig Business – Time for Change

The Pig Business Team is organising a „Pig Business– Time for Change“ event at the EU Parliament on 9 February 2011 to inform the politicians, commissioners, councillors and their advisers about the true cost of industrial farming on people, pigs and the planet and suggest solutions. It is sponsored by three MEPs: Janusz Wojciechowski MEP (European Conservatives and Reformists), Jose Bove MEP (Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance), and Dan Jorgensen MEP (Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats).

Short clips from the film will be followed by experts talking on the following subjects:

1. Breakdown of the rural economy
2. Subsidies that distort the market
3. Animal welfare
4. Environmental pollution
5. Impacts on human health
6. Feed from soy grown in South America
7. Solutions

Their key NGO associates will urge their members to write to their MEPs to ask them to attend the event and recommend suggested policy changes and enforcement in line with the CAP review paper to be launched in November. These associates include Compassion in World Farming, European Coordination Via Campesina, Food and Water Watch Europe, Friends of the Earth, IFOAM, Soil Association, and WSPA.

Though members of NGOs might choose to follow their own NGOs recommended legislative changes, Pig Business is recommending that MEPs influence the revision of the Common Agricultural Policy to give support to small scale farmers, raise animal welfare regulations, enforce existing regulations, introduce mandatory method of production labelling which informs consumers whether the meat has been produced in a factory farm, end subsidies and loans that favour factory farming and distort the market, end the import of soya grown on cleared Rainforest and Cerrado, and source high welfare pork for public sector bodies. Contact

The Pig Business Team