The True Cost of Factory Farming and Industrial Agriculture Does Not Show up at the Supermarket

Important report validates the work of the Rodale Institute.

In a very comprehensive report, Unraveling the Food-Health Nexus: Addressing Practices, Political Economy, and Power Relations to Build Healthier Food Systems, The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and The Global Alliance for the Future of Food make the case that the industrial food system is largely to blame for our “staggering” health care costs, including:

– $760 billion yearly cost of obesity (global estimate for 2025)
– $673 billion yearly cost of diabetes (global number for 2012)
– $3.5 trillion global cost of malnutrition
– $557 billion cost of endocrine disruptor exposure (the U.S. and the EU)

The report asserts that “many of the most severe health impacts trace back to some of the core industrial food and farming practices, e.g., chemical-intensive agriculture; intensive livestock production; and the mass production and mass marketing of ultra-processed foods.”

Making changes to this current model will be challenging because of one simple reason: power.

“The industrial food and farming model, which systematically generates negative health impacts, also generates highly unequal power relations. This allows powerful actors including the private sector, governments, donors, and others to set the terms of debate. The prevailing solutions obscure the social and environmental fallout of industrial food systems, leaving the root causes of poor health unaddressed and reinforcing existing social-health inequalities,” the report concludes.

With the connection between how food is produced and the negative health impact on society so strong, the “environmental impacts of organic production (and the implications for long-term productivity) are being increasingly documented, and form part of the growing evidence base on alternative systems.”

Yet, what might be the most interesting part of the entire report was when it said that “compositional differences have regularly been found between organic and conventionally produced items, but long-term cohort studies showing these differences translating into human health benefits are still lacking.”

And this is exactly what the Rodale Institute is attempting to document, as I wrote about last month.

Rodale Institute is trying to close the circle and make the empirical case that regenerative organic agriculture — through its superior soil health — has a direct positive impact on the health of humans.

When it comes to our day-to-day lives, however, the true price of industrial agriculture is just not accounted for when we are at the supermarket.

Yet, becoming aware of industrial agriculture’s heavy toll on society is a critical first step to bring about change and to encourage the world to embrace organic, regenerative farming.

(Photo above courtesy of Mercy for Animals.)

Have a great day! Max Goldberg, Founder