Public health and environmental advocacy groups said that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chose to benefit the factory farming industry instead of protecting communities and drinking water late Tuesday when it denied an anti-pollution petition filed in 2017 by nearly three dozen groups.
Food & Water Watch (FWW), the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and North Carolina Environmental Justice Network were among the organizations that filed the petition six years ago and sued the agency last year due to its “unreasonable delay” in answering the request for stronger rules to prevent water pollution from hundreds of thousands of factory farms across the United States.
The EPA responded to the legal challenge Tuesday by denying the original petition and announcing it would form a federal subcommittee to study the effects of pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and make recommendations to the agency.
The subcommittee is expected to convene in 2024 and its work could take 12-18 months, leaving open the possibility that — should President Joe Biden lose his reelection campaign next year — the question of regulating factory farm pollution could be left up to a Republican administration.
“Factory farms pose a significant and mounting threat to clean water, largely because EPA’s weak rules have left most of the industry entirely unregulated,” said Tarah Heinzen, legal director for FWW. “EPA’s deeply flawed response amounts to yet more delay, and completely misses the moment.”
Though the EPA pledged to study the effects of water pollution from factory farms, the petitioners noted that the impact has already been well-documented.
According to the Sierra Club, “water pollution is possible at virtually any point in a CAFO’s operation,” as waste from factory farms is generally not treated for disease-causing pathogens, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, or heavy metals.
Animal waste spills and overflows can lead to contaminated runoff that ends up in waterways, stormwater can mix with manure and milkhouse waste that flows into drains, waste storage units can overflow or burst, and catch basins can inadvertently drain waste into waterways.
CFS said in a statement that factory farms “operate like sewerless cities” and can contaminate “drinking water with cancer-causing nitrates” as well as flooding homes with waste during storms and leaving communities without safe places for water recreation.
Citing the EPA’s own data in a 2020 brief, FWW found that pollution from factory farms “threatens or impairs over 14,000 miles of rivers and streams and more than 90,000 acres of lakes and ponds nationwide.”
“We know that animal factories are a huge source of water pollution and that our freshwater is in crisis, and yet EPA has failed to uphold its duty to protect our environment from this industry,” said Amy van Saun, a senior attorney with CFS. “We have a right to clean and safe water and we cannot afford to wait any longer to stop the tide of pollution from animal factories.”
The 2017 petition called on the EPA to improve the CAFO permitting process, as fewer than one-third of the largest 21,000 factory farms have National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits, which regulate the point sources which discharge pollutants into waterways.
Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, said that by denying the petition the EPA “chose to further a special exemption for factory farms that benefits global meat companies while undermining independent farmers raising animals in ways that protect our water.”
“Today’s EPA decision kicks the can down the road,” he said, “instead of acting to protect rural communities and our nation’s waterways.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.