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Paper short abstract:

This proposal analyzes how livestock farming in Europe has moved from manure management to slurry overproduction driven by policies and market mechanisms and accompanied by pollution. We further identify policy interventions to tackle these pollution problems using regional approaches in Spain and G

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this contribution is to analyze how national and international politics and the feed and food industry pushed livestock farming in Europe from manure to slurry based production systems accompanied by excessive slurry accumulation.

The foundations of the European industrial livestock system have been laid in the second food regime as a result of industrial state policies and food push-market strategies and consolidated in the third food regime by neoliberal, free market policies in a global market.

Resulting emissions of pollutants have been tackled by international agreements and European policies since the 1970s, for example the Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in 1979, the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992, or the EU Nitrates Directive in 1991.

Yet, legislation ends up being implemented with difficulties at the local level, generating conflicts due to the difficult adaptation of norms to specific agrarian contexts. We reflect on how regulatory changes and market mechanisms of the second and the third food regime shaped livestock farming and how environmental policies affect livestock farming at the regional level. To this end, we use regional approaches in Spain and Germany focusing in intensive livestock regions in dairy, pig and poultry farming.

As sources we use (i) for environmental regulation, the international rules of States and organizations and (ii) for the impacts of policies and the food industry on the case study regions, fieldwork, Oral History, state archive material, newspapers and specialized farming magazines as well as online resources.