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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/25/drugs-hormones-excrement-pig-farms-mexico-water-yucatan>
"The stink of excrement was the first thing the residents of Sitilpech noticed
when the farm opened in 2017. It hung over the colourful one-storey homes and
kitchen gardens in the Maya town in Yucatán, and has never left. Next, the
trees stopped bearing fruit, their leaves instead covered with black spots.
Then, the water from the vast, porous aquifer emerged from the well with a
horrible, overwhelming stench.
“Before, we used that water for everything: for cooking, for drinking, for
bathing. Now we can’t even give it to animals. Today, we have to give the
chickens purified water because otherwise they get diarrhoea,” says one
resident. “The radishes grow thin and the coriander often turns yellow. This
has always been a quiet town, where life was very good until that farm
started,” they say.
Sitilpech lies on the edge of the Ring of Cenotes, a vast network of sinkhole
lakes and underground rivers formed by a meteorite impact 66m years ago. The
pig mega-farm is just under a kilometre from the first home in the town. It is
part of a network of between 500 and 800 facilities that have appeared across
the Yucatán peninsula in the past 20 years, often nestled in the middle of the
internationally important Yucatán moist forest. A mega-farm can hold up to
50,000 pigs, packed tightly together in small pens. The urine and excrement,
antibiotics and hormone treatments seep out beneath their corrals, and are then
dried in open-air waste lakes in the tropical heat.
For those that live around them, the spread of the pig mega-farms is a human
and ecological disaster. Some Maya villages in Yucatán are outnumbered by pigs
100 to one. In the rainy season, the farms pump out the pig waste through
sprinkler systems; it oozes into the porous limestone watershed which connects
the Ring of Cenotes. Local people say that those who drink the tap water fall
sick, and there are severe consequences for the area’s biodiversity.
“More than 90% of the 800 pig factories estimated to exist in Yucatán operate
without any type of environmental permit,” claims Lourdes Medina Carrillo, an
environmental lawyer. “These are projects without a record of prior Indigenous
consultation, arising from the destruction of forests considered the second
most important on the continent, without permits for changes in land use, and
with impacts such as water contamination,” she claims."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
