Under pressure from the industrialization and homogenization of food products, one breed of chicken, beef cattle, pig, or even rabbit is now erased from the surface of the globe every month.
This trend deeply worries the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which sees these disappearances as "the biggest global threat to farm animal diversity," which, at the same time, reduces the ability to confront natural catastrophes such as global warming and the emergence of new diseases, the international organization indicates in a report made public last week.
With the first genetic portrait of breeding stock animals in the world in hand, the FAO is, in fact, sounding the alarm: by always wanting to produce more at lower cost, intensive agriculture is in the process of speeding to its ruin. How? By concentrating on a too-limited number of animal breeds, like the Holstein in the milk-production sector, the Duroc pig for pork-breeding and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens, with, as an inevitable consequence, "a risk of extinction of several other indigenous and heirloom varieties," but also an "erosion of genetic diversity" that today's children risk paying for tomorrow, as one may read in the 500-page document.
Entitled, "The State of Zoogenetic Global Resources for Food and Agriculture," this report was unveiled last Thursday by the Commission of Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture during a meeting in Rome, Italy
The same forces that are arrayed to overthrow all NATURAL diversity in the name of homogeneity and industrialized predictability are now threatening the sphere of domesticated life. The narrowing of diversity among domestics echoes and exacerbates the effects of the same process occurring concurrently in nature as humans exterminate one species after another, and fuck up the remaining ecosphere so badly that the remaining creatures go extinct.
There's MUCH more, and none of it encouraging, if you follow the link in the headline here.
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