The Dairy-Political Complex Is Birthing A Flu Pandemic

The United States has a 1.4 billion pound national stockpile of cheese.

Yes, cheese.

In refrigerated warehouses and even caves across the country you can find cheese.

The stockpile is so large it would fill up the Capitol building, top to bottom.

This might seem a strange but essentially harmless data point. It isn’t. It highlights, almost comically, the corrupt love-in between American politicians and the dairy industry.

A love-in that could, quite literally, be about to get us all killed.

Because as you probably know, dairy farms have become ground zero for the spread of bird flu across the US.

This has been fairly well-covered in recent weeks.

What’s been almost entirely absent from the coverage is the privileged place in the pecking order that has been granted to the dairy industry over decades.

And how this privilege, and the dairy-political complex, has torpedoed the public health response to the spread of avian flu.

If the capitalist free market is your thing, the dairy industry is an insult to it. Dairy corporations have, appropriately, been sucking on the government teat for decades.

Demand for dairy in the US is in free fall. Milk consumption has declined more than 40% from the 1970s to today, despite the country adding 125 million more people since then. Between the early 90s and 2018, nearly 100,000 licensed dairy operators went bust or closed up. Almost a halving of the total number of farms.

So far, so economically rational. But here’s the kicker. Despite a massive fall in demand, the production of milk is at record highs. Most US states are recording production growth, but one in particular stands above all the others: Texas. Here, milk production has grown nearly 70% in a decade.

Why? Monopoly production. Or, in that most euphemistic of capitalist terms, “consolidation.” Despite the near halving of total dairy farms, the average number of cows per farm has increased 139%, according to USDA data. More than 70% of American milk is now produced on farms with at least 500 cows. The largest farms can have 25,000 animals side-by-side.

And this has all been assisted by politicians up to their necks in milk and cheese, from Obama to Bernie Sanders to Trump to Biden.

In 2008 Obama bailed out the dairy industry with $350 million in direct support, aided by an amendment written by Bernie Sanders, which included a $60 million bulk buy of cheese and other dairy products. Activists had pleaded with Sanders to include environmental provisions and other measures to prevent the cash going to industrial farms and the rich executives that run them. He didn’t.

Then in one of his last acts before leaving the presidency, Obama again bulk bought millions of pounds of cheese direct from dairy farmers. Trump continued the trend, adding to the cheese stashed in caves by buying $50 million worth of dairy products. Biden, with a history of pumping up industrial dairy farming, hasn’t changed course. Subsidies to meat and dairy farmers during the Biden administration have been virtually identical to those under Trump.

None of this should come as a surprise. It can be hard to know where the dairy lobby ends and the US government begins. The head of the US department of agriculture is Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Big Dairy state Iowa, who joined after quitting his $1 million a year job with lobby group the US Dairy Export Council. Vilsack was also Obama’s USDA head. Trump’s USDA head, Sonny Purdue, joined board of directors meetings with lobby group International Dairy Foods Association, and at their request permitted fattier chocolate and strawberry milk to be sold in school cafeterias.

Given this backdrop, what are the chances that the response to the H5N1 flu outbreak would prioritize public health over industry profits?

Dairy farms in Texas have been refusing access to avian flu researchers because it might damage their business. The USDA refused to upload avian-cow flu sequence data on the global standard database, scrubbing metadata, including locations where cows tested positive, to protect the dairy industry. No US politicians criticised the USDA for this move. None have spoken up and demanded farms open their doors to scientists. Last week a local reporter for NPR took raw milk samples from Texas farms to a number of USDA authorized labs, and they flat-out refused to test the milk for H5N1 virus. When she asked the USDA about it, they said it was nothing to do with them. Even though the labs are authorized by the USDA.

Texas is at the epicentre of the outbreak, the state where decades of government policy pushing “consolidation” is creating supermassive farms at a rate that eclipses any other state. It was in Texas where the first confirmed cow-to-human case of bird flu was recorded, and a couple of Texan cities, most notably dairy farm-heavy Amarillo, have seen unexplained wastewater spikes in influenza A (of which H5N1 is one subtype).

It is entirely unsurprising that the US dairy industry has become ground zero for H5N1. You really couldn’t have handpicked a worse industry for bird flu to have taken root in.

This isn’t just an American problem. The dairy and meat lobby has an iron grip on western political systems. In the UK, the government has banned plant-based milk from using the word milk, and this ban looks likely to be extended to the words cheese and yoghurt after years of lobbying from the dairy industry. It’s absurd. In Spain, a government minister was disowned by his own party and eventually sacked for criticizing the proliferation of mega farms in the country.

Dairy farming is a public health catastrophe for reasons beyond its role as a reservoir for bird flu.

As dairy farms increase in size, run-off, a mixture of cow shit and chemical contaminants, is polluting US rivers and drinking water aquifers with nitrogen, sometimes to unsafe levels. This is happening in many places. This run-off can also contain E.coli, antibiotics and hormones.

Then there are the personal health costs of dairy consumption, directly provoked by the corrupt relationship between politicians and the dairy industry.

A majority of the world’s population (around 70%), can’t digest lactose. In the US, estimates are that 40% of adults do not produce the digestive enzyme necessary to break down lactase. The numbers for African and Asian-Americans could be as high as 80%. Yet, astonishingly, the USDA recommends two to three servings of dairy products daily. There is absolutely no scientific basis for recommending such a high daily intake. It stems entirely from the capture of the USDA by the dairy lobby. Yet there is nothing on the USDA website warning about lactose intolerance. Many Americans don’t even know they have it. The US government is causing people pain, chronic GI issues and health complications - including autoimmune diseases that can arise from ignoring lactose intolerance - for the sake of dairy industry profits.

As for milk being a good source of calcium, it’s a lie. A lie repeated so often, through so many generations, it has become the truth. In fact, milk appears to deplete calcium levels, and consumption seems to be inversely related to bone health, with lower rates of osteoporosis in countries with low dairy intake.

Then there are the planetary consequences.

An Oxford University study found producing one glass of dairy milk requires ten times more land than is needed to produce a glass of oat milk. More emissions are created producing a kilogram of cheese than a kilogram of pork. Cows are the most emissions intensive animal to raise in the world, producing copious amounts of methane. Every 100 calories of grains and cereals fed to cows gets us just 40 calories of milk. We could have the 100 calories. Overall, animal farming is responsible for 60% of global emissions from agriculture.

Finally there are the ethical horrors.

Female cows produce milk for their calves. But farms aren’t in the business of feeding cows. They are in the business of providing humans with dairy products for financial profit. This means millions of male calves are killed within days of being born so humans can instead drink the mothers’ milk. Cows are sentient beings with rich inner lives. When calves are taken away, the mother is known to cry out loudly and grieve for days. Female cows are also artificially inseminated every 10 months to ensure constant milk production, a violent process which involves shackling her hind legs to the ground and forcefully injecting her with semen. It can lead to permanent nerve damage and even death. A female cow has a natural average age of 20 to 25 years old, but few make it to their seventh birthday because by then they are no longer “economically viable.” Then there is the process of removing horns from female cows, or “de-budding.” In some cases a hot iron is pressed into their head to damage the immature horn tissue to prevent it from growing. Sometimes the tissue is burnt out with chemicals. Sometimes it’s just scooped out. All without pain relief. One quarter of all dairy cows suffer lameness due to injury or disease in the feet and legs from shuffling around small spaces on poor surfaces. People who work in the dairy and meat industry, surrounded by suffering, required to participate in cruel acts, have higher rates of depression and post traumatic stress disorder than workers in any other industry. In the US, more than half of dairy workers are immigrants, many undocumented, exploited, abused, often working 16 hours a day, every day.

Dairy farming, indeed all industrial animal farming, is an ethical, planetary and public health catastrophe.

It forces workers to inflict awful suffering in the name of personal survival. It turns us into passive consumers of cruelty. It is deteriorating the conditions for collective survival on our planet. It causes torment and distress for many millions of sentient beings. And it looks likely to deliver the next pandemic.

That this industry, with all its cruelty and violence, even exists, shames our collective humanity.

This is, however, not to divorce it from the broader capitalist context, a context that demands mega farm “consolidation," demands mega killing, demands mega pollution, demands the exploitation of desperate people.

Dairy farming might do all this and birth the next pandemic, but it also delivers mega profits to a small number of people.

That our elected leaders have spent decades boosting the industrialization of every aspect of animal farming and profiting from it, up to the brink of a new pandemic, is just another in the long, long list of charges that makes them unfit to lead.

We must find new ways - and new people - to run our societies.