President Obama Fails to Regulate Meat Industry

Mother Jones recently published an article based on research by the Pew Commission, detailing President Obama’s failure to live up to his earlier promises to regulate the meat industry’s detrimental impact on the environment, the marketplace, and the American population. The news sources notes that in 2008, Obama said he would would “strictly monitor and regulate pollution,” but since then he has neglected to make feedlots accountable for their manure waste or their harmful emissions, even though factory farms and feedlots have been linked to surrounding populations contracting antibacterial pathogens and developing respiratory conditions. Other problematic behaviors by the animal agriculture industry that have gone unchecked include commercial meatpackers’ increasing monopolization over the market, unchecked antibiotic use by factory farms—resulting in the proliferation of antibiotic resistant bacteria—and increased production line speeds at poultry plants, which put consumers’ health and workers at risk.