What do the countries Vietnam, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and South Korea have in common? You are one of those countries that, after talks with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture about the trade in processed and treated pig products, agreed to the lifting of the export ban after the occurrence of African swine fever in Germany a year ago: You are buying again. But meat as a product of German agriculture continues to have major problems for the future. Because German agriculture, that will still mean in 2021: mass animal production, which not only serves to secure the German and perhaps parts of the European food supply.
With every new concession of peasant meat production with regard to animal welfare, Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner gives a mantra-like warning that “we” have to “ensure” the nutrition of “our” population - as if it were shortly after the Second World War or as if the pandemic was not just German Dependence on international pharmaceutical companies demonstrated, but also creates food shortages. But how do Ms. Klöckner's warning words actually fit in with the fact that sixty percent of the agricultural land is used for fodder cultivation, i.e. not directly for the production of human food?
Of course, the livestock that we eat and those that we export must be fed. But does Germany really have to consume almost sixty kilos of meat per capita per year, as the current Meat Atlas 2021 shows? Every other day everyone in this country eats an average of three hundred grams of steak or its equivalent. Apparently, medical knowledge has still not spread that these amounts are very questionable from a nutritional point of view. To put it bluntly: The availability of cheap meat increases the risk of cancer in the German population.
The amount slaughtered in Germany last year was 8.5 million tons.
If 4.8 million tons are eaten in this country, what happens to the rest, is it exported?
It would have to be even more, because we also import.
Treated and processed products are increasingly exported, whereas the transport of live animals is increasingly regulated and last year it fell by more than ten percent in export and import.
The cause is probably stricter requirements: After fourteen hours, the transport has to be interrupted for an hour in order to provide the animals with water, food and exercise.
After that, the transport can continue for a further fourteen hours.
If there is still more, a 24-hour break must be taken.
Cattle farmers rely on Argentine steaks
Not all, but only some federal states have banned the transport of live animals to more distant foreign countries, which is why agricultural companies that sell live cattle to Morocco first send the animals to another federal state so that they can be sent from there to Africa. Animal producers oppose this, after all we also imported New Zealand lamb and Argentinian steaks, and besides that, German cattle farmers understand their business particularly well and are therefore so successful: supply and demand also regulate the meat market. Even if the theses of scientific animal ethicists and biologists speak against it, the animal is legally considered a thing, and that is in principle the basis of fattening stalls in which thousands of animals mature into schnitzel in a confined space and with medication.