Wu Linhai, chief expert and professor of business school, Institute of food safety risk management, Jiangnan University
Biosafety generally refers to the hazards and potential risks of various factors related to biology to society, economy, ecological environment and human health. The core issue is to correctly deal with the relationship between human and other creatures in nature. Animal welfare protection plays a fundamental role in ensuring biosafety. The window period of establishing and improving animal welfare protection system in China has opened.
Poor protection of animal welfare is an important risk for the outbreak of Zoonoses
On February 24, the 16th session of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress made the decision on banning illegal wildlife trade in an all-round way, which is of great significance to completely cut off the source of virus transmission from wild animals to human beings, maintain biological safety and ecological safety, and effectively prevent major public health risks It lays an important foundation for the formulation of the next biosafety law. But we should also fully realize that in addition to wild animals, breeding animals are another important source of outbreaks of zoonotic infectious diseases. It is also an important part of the construction of the national biosafety system to establish a comprehensive protection system of laws, regulations and systems covering the protection of wildlife and breeding animals. Animal welfare includes physiological, environmental, health, behavioral and psychological welfare. The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned countries around the world that human health is closely related to animal welfare. Poor animal welfare treatment will greatly increase the probability of animal disease, and increase the risk of animal diseases (such as zoonoses) spreading from animals to humans.
Scientific research has confirmed that there are more than 200 kinds of infectious diseases that threaten human health, which can be transmitted from animals to humans. Among them, more than 130 zoonoses have been found in China. Taking live pigs as an example, the World Health Organization and FAO pointed out that there are six major infectious diseases in the process of pig breeding, including hog cholera, transmissible gastroenteritis, swine influenza, paratyphoid fever of piglets, colibacillosis of piglets, and swine lung disease. Although hog cholera can only infect pigs, anthrax can infect almost all mammals, including human beings. In recent years, the outbreak of new infectious diseases is more and more frequent in the world. These new infectious diseases have a common feature, that is, they are related to animals, especially wild animals, to varying degrees, and 70% of the new infectious diseases are zoonoses. Although the causes of new zoonotic infectious diseases are very complex, people's indifference to animal welfare protection is an extremely important inducement. A typical case is the global epidemic of influenza A (H1N1) which started in Mexico and the United States in 2009. In that year, the World Health Organization confirmed that there were 29080 confirmed cases of influenza A (H1N1) in 79 countries and regions, including 226 confirmed cases in the mainland of China. The origin of influenza A (H1N1) is a pig farm in Mexico, where flies fly, sewage flows and air pollution. Pigs live in a very crowded space. Poor pig welfare has led to the tragedy of influenza A (H1N1) in the global pandemic.
Large scale animal breeding model may aggravate public health risks
The virus is mainly transmitted between human and animal through human consumption of animal food. With the development of economy and society and the transformation and upgrading of agriculture, the industrialization and scale of livestock and poultry breeding industry are constantly improving. Out of the excessive pursuit of economic benefits and productivity, the livestock and poultry breeding mode has appeared the trend of large-scale and intensive, and the productivity has been improved, but it may induce public health risks.
Market demand for animal food. Domestic animal food mainly includes livestock (pork, beef, mutton, etc.), poultry (chicken, duck, goose, etc.). In 2009 and 2018, the total output of livestock and poultry meat in China was 75.09 million tons and 85.17 million tons respectively, and the corresponding output of livestock and poultry meat was 59.14 million tons, 15.95 million tons, 65.23 million tons and 1994 million tons respectively. The average annual growth rate of livestock and poultry meat, livestock and poultry meat output in 10 years was 1.41%, 1.09% and 2.51% respectively. The lower growth rate of livestock meat is mainly due to the decline of pork production. Due to the outbreak of swine fever in Africa in August 2018, the National Pork Production in 2018 was 54.04 million tons, an increase of 5.15 million tons compared with 48.89 million tons in 2009. In 2019, the output of pork was only 42.55 million tons, down 21.3% over the previous year. The demand gap of pork in domestic market is mainly made up by importing and increasing poultry production. In 2018, the import volume of pork reached 1193000 tons, 11.23 times that of 2000. Poultry production increased rapidly. In 2019, poultry production reached a record high of 22.39 million tons, an increase of 12.3% over the previous year, 1.44 times of that in 2009, and has become the primary alternative product of pork.
Market demand promotes high-density breeding. In order to meet the market demand and reduce the labor cost, based on the changes of environment, land and other policies, livestock and poultry breeding scale plus large-scale. Take pigs for example. At present, about 22% of the households with less than 100 live pigs go out of the market every year, 24.5% of the households with 5000 or more live pigs, and 17.5% of the households with 10000 or more live pigs. The breeding structure changes rapidly from "pyramid" to "spindle" structure. The transformation and upgrading of aquaculture structure is of great significance to the reconstruction of industrial value chain, but it also brings a series of problems that need to be highly concerned.
It is possible that the high-density culture can induce the risk of public health and safety. Large scale breeding makes animals live in the bad environment of "dark day", which is easy to produce various diseases. Still take pigs. For example, if the breeding density exceeds the critical point, it will not only lead to the decrease of the feed intake of pigs, but also lead to the strong stress response of pigs and increase the contact friction between pigs, which will change the natural behavior of pigs and lead to the infection of pigs. Once the epidemic virus spreads, it is likely to spread to the population due to human contact with pigs. From AIDS to mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza, SARS, and H1N1 influenza A, zoonoses have sounded the alarm for human beings again and again.
Lack of public awareness of animal welfare leads to poor protection of animal welfare
The lack of scientific literacy of public health in China and the lack of knowledge of animal welfare by consumers and producers are the important reasons for the lack of animal welfare protection.
Public health literacy is seriously inadequate. According to the health literacy monitoring report of Chinese residents, the health literacy level of Chinese residents rose to 17.06% in 2018. Although it has doubled compared with 2012, it will take 30 years to catch up with the advanced level of developed countries. In 2018, the basic knowledge and concept literacy, healthy lifestyle and behavior literacy and basic skill literacy of Chinese residents were 30.52%, 17.04% and 18.68% respectively, which were far behind those of developed countries. The public lacked sufficient knowledge and ability to effectively avoid all kinds of health risks. Some diners blindly eat wild animals, which is the best annotation of the lack of health literacy.
Farmers' cognition of pig welfare is low. Most farmers pay attention to the benefits of livestock and poultry breeding, but they generally know little about animal welfare protection. We have conducted a special survey on the cognition of pig welfare in large pig breeding counties in Jiangsu, Anhui and other provinces. Among the pig farmers of different scales interviewed, 64.71% of 530 had never heard of animal welfare at all, and only 3.29% of them had a comparative understanding of animal welfare. The vast majority of producers surveyed had very low awareness of animal welfare. This is a very obvious contrast with the recognition of about 90% of animal farmers in the United States, Japan and other developed countries.
The residents have low cognition and doubt about the behavior of welfare protection in the process of breeding. 42.44% of the urban and rural residents and more than 80% of the total respondents said they did not know or had some understanding, only 6.96% of the respondents said they knew or had some understanding. When asked about "if there are local farms claiming that they are concerned about animal welfare in the breeding process, do you believe it?" 73.63% of the respondents said they did not believe it or doubt it.
Suggestions on the protection of animal welfare
Based on the importance of protecting animal welfare, we suggest that:
One is to strive to form an atmosphere of animal welfare and protection in the whole society. Put the universal education of animal welfare related knowledge into the category of ecological civilization education, break the wrong idea that animal welfare is equal to animal rights, and that human welfare has not been fully realized, so we can not consider the backward idea of animal welfare temporarily. Guiding the whole society to fully realize the protection of animal welfare will not only help to improve the taste of animal food, reduce the environmental pollution caused by the breeding industry, but also help to cut off the transmission channels between animals and humans, which plays an important role in preventing public health risks.
Second, we will speed up the formulation of industry standards for animal welfare protection. The welfare requirements of pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese and fish are different. The first standard in the series of standards of farm animal welfare in China, which is formulated by the animal welfare international cooperation committee of China Association for the promotion of international agricultural cooperation and other organizations, is "farm animal welfare requirements: Pigs", which fills in the gap of domestic animal welfare standards. But generally speaking, there is a serious lack of animal welfare industry norms in China. It is suggested that the national industry association should take the lead, start from the national conditions and learn from the international experience, and organize forces to form a scientific and operational industry standard of welfare and protection for the main cultivated animals, including feed, drinking water, breeding environment and management, health plan, slaughter and segmentation. In combination with the system of qualification certificate for edible agricultural products under trial implementation, the company organizes large enterprises in the industry to take the lead and use the power of supply chain to promote it in livestock breeding enterprises, farmers' professional cooperatives and family farms.
Third, public health should be included in the policy of livestock and poultry industry. Starting from the reality, all localities should grasp the dialectical relationship between animal welfare protection and breeding scale, employment, animal food quality, public health risks, and prohibit the simple "one size fits all" approach with scale as the threshold. Give full play to the leading role of leading enterprises and professional cooperative economic organizations, and form a stable community of interests with small and medium-sized breeding enterprises (farms and households) by means of unified production, unified marketing, technology sharing, Brand Co creation, etc. We should implement the industrial policy of equal treatment to the market subjects that conform to the environmental protection, health and epidemic prevention standards. We will further improve the prevention and control system for animal epidemics, strengthen the detection and Quarantine of epidemics, build infrastructure suitable for environmental protection, and minimize the risk of the occurrence and spread of zoonotic diseases.
Fourth, we should improve the animal welfare protection laws and regulations that are compatible with biosafety as soon as possible. More than 100 countries in the world have formulated laws and regulations on animal protection. Since 2006, there have been representatives of the National People's Congress and CPPCC members calling for animal protection legislation. But it may be put on hold because the time is not ripe, the understanding is not consistent, and the public opinion foundation is not yet available. Novel coronavirus pneumonia is now in the open window after animal disease legislation. It is suggested that the NPC further listen to the suggestions of all parties, in accordance with the general secretary Xi Jinping's request for "promoting the introduction of biosafety law as soon as possible".