[IPSM] Kahnawake residents protest industrial hog farms

[Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movment - Montreal]

reposted from: www.easterndoor.com

Coming Soon To A River Near You


By: Brendan Johns


Community members were among the 200 protesters who marched on Premier
Jean Charest's office on Valentine's Day and their message was clear:
Kahnawake will not stand idly by and allow industrial hog farms to pollute
our water.


The Kahnawake contingent, which included Eva Johnson from the Environment
Office and MCK chief Tiorahkwathe Gilbert, joined forced with concerned
citizens from throughout the region in an attempt to pressure the Charest
government to reinstate a moratorium on industrial hog farms. The
moratorium was instituted in 2002, shortly after the Canadian Medical
Assocation issued a report calling industrial hog farms a hazard to public
health, but it was allowed to expire this past December.


The Quebec hog farm industry is a veritable powerhouse, generating over $3
billion a year and accounting for 40 percent of Canada's pork exports.
Aside from the purely ethical question of raising animals in confined pens
with no room to move, no fresh air, and hellish living conditions, there
is the question of the environmental impact of these "pork factories."


The nearly five million pigs raised each year in Quebec generate a
mind-boggling amount of manure, with each animal producing two tons of
liquid manure which must first be pre-treated in giant lagoons or holding
tanks before being sprayed on farmers' fields or injected underground.


Pig manure seepage and runoff can lead to water table contamination and
killer algae blooms in nearby lakes and rivers. This form of
contamination, while an environmental disaster in itself, does not pose an
immediate threat to the population because the contaminants can safely be
filtered out by Kahnawake's high-tech water filtration plant. However,
antibiotics routinely injected to be filtered out using normal procedures
and eventually make their way into the community's tap water.


In the United States, the swine industry along uses 10.3 million pounds of
antibiotics for non-therapeutic purposes, meaning that drugs are used to
promote growth and appetite and to prevent infection of the animals' open
wounds; wounds caused by their continuous psychotic rubbing against the
steel walls of their narrow pens.


This widespread use of antibiotics has led to a rise in drug-resistant
bacteria and several studies have found concentrations of
antibiotic-resistant bacteris in surface and groundwater near industrial
pig farms. The latest study, published by Johns Hopkins University just
this month, has even discovered airborne multidrug-resistant bacteria in
the exhaust fumes being vented from an industrial hog farm.


With the provincial moratorium lifted, there is little standing in the way
of corporations wishing to expand in this very lucrative industry.
Grassroots organizations such as the Haut Saint-Laurent Rural Coalition
are attempting to raise public awareness of the situation, but progress
has been slow. Tim Montour, a local activist who became involved with the
group last year, says that the turnout from Kahnawake at the St.
Valentine's Day protest was a little disheartening: "The group from
Kahnawake was really small, which is discouraging, but we still considered
the march a success."


The group is still calling on the public to wake up before our waterways
become like the one pictured on the front page, at which point they say it
will be too late to do anything.


Websites and films of interest: www.rurale.ca or www.environmentaldefense.
and "Bacon: Le Film" by Hugo Latulippe, available from the National Film
Board of Canada.


-- 
the INDIGENOUS PEOPLES SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT is a Montreal based collective
whose primary goal is to ally ourselves with indigenous peoples in the
active fight for mutual self-determination and decolonization

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