"The most notable trade barrier [between the US and Europe] has been the European ban on chlorine-bathed poultry. U.S. poultry producers frequently rely on a tasty chlorine rinse to kill the pathogens that, thanks to unsanitary slaughterhouse standards, regularly pervade our chicken. The EU — and until recently, Russia — has labeled such poultry unfit to eat, resulting in the American poultry industry losing an estimated $300 million in potential sales. American poultry producers have been outraged by this “injustice” for years, and earlier this year they urged the World Trade Organization to pursue legal action against the EU for losses incurred by the ban. The EU seems unfazed; it has no plans whatsoever to change the policy, nor its ban on beef treated with hormones."

"Some informed observers now believe Big Meat’s days are numbered. In an article titled “The Slavery of Our Time,” Foreign Policy predicted that worldwide meat consumption will go into a tailspin starting by 2025. Meanwhile, straight out of cattle country’s Midwestern base, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune sought to open a national dialog about the ethics of food. And Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer called for an end to factory farming, as well as a 50 percent tax on meat. A similar tax had been proposed a few months earlier by The Urban Institute.
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As the evidence mounted linking livestock—especially cows—to global warming, agribusiness did what it does best: lobbied government. In January, the EPA decided that factory farms and feedlots would not have to tell anyone when they released illegal levels of gases into the air. And in September, California released a plan to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Businesses of every stripe were affected by California’s plan, but agribusiness was specifically exempted.
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Fresh evidence emerged about the grim state of the world’s fisheries, with a team of experts calling for closing one-third of the world’s oceans to fishing for the next twenty years.
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An Associated Press report concluded that 87 million Americans are stricken with food poisoning each year, with 325,000 people requiring hospitalization, and 5000 deaths. Food safety remained an issue that could be essentially solved, given determined industry action—action the industry sought to avoid at all costs.
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Unfortunately, almost none of the resultant media coverage bothered to mention that the [swine flu] was conclusively traced to factory farms, and would therefore never have emerged without the existence of the pork industry."