Focus: Feeding the Risk Society: Factory Farming and the Intensification of Risk

The world faces unprecedented challenges in the coming decades, arising from the conjunction of the climate crisis, collapsing biodiversity, a growing and rapidly urbanising population, and intensifying consumption of finite resources. Central to these challenges is the question of how we produce, consume and think about our food, and the profound implications for the natural environment as well as for human and animal health, security and wellbeing. Across the world older models of farming and animal husbandry are increasingly being replaced by industrial animal production operations, with the proliferation of ‘factory farming’. This process began in the mid-twentieth-century in the US and Europe, but is now accelerating worldwide alongside changing patterns of consumption linked to dominant models of agro-economic development. Current trends point to a global trajectory of growing consumption of animal-derived foods alongside increasing industrialisation and intensification of animal production. This trajectory brings an iceberg of overlapping risks, to environmental sustainability, food security, human health and animal welfare, with consequences reaching into every corner of life on earth. There is therefore increasing recognition of the need for a transition to more sustainable food systems which can mitigate these risks and nourish over the long term those things we most value, otherwise the century ahead presents a series of daunting systemic threats to human societies and the ecosystems that support human and nonhuman life.