Residents of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico are complaining about the waste oozing from hundreds of mega pig farms which is destroying the environment and affecting their health.
Between 500 and 800 mega-pig-farm facilities have appeared across the Yucatán peninsula in the past 20 years, often in the middle of the Yucatán rainforest. A mega-farm can hold up to 50,000 pigs crowded in small pens. The urine and excrement, antibiotics and hormone treatments seep out from beneath their enclosures and are then dried in open-air waste lakes. In the rainy season, the farms pump out the pig waste through sprinkler systems, and it ends up in the local water supply after it oozes into the porous limestone watershed which connects the rivers people use. For this reason, people often fall ill when they drink the tap water.
Environmental lawyer Lourdes Medina Carrillo told the Guardian, “More than 90% of the 800 pig factories estimated to exist in Yucatán operate without any environmental permit. 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…“The medications, the hormones they give to the pigs, in addition to their excrement, end up in the water. And that water that the industry uses then travels inside the caves, the caverns, and the wells through the Ring of Cenotes. This is the common water that nature and communities use for their supply.”
Residents in the municipality of Sitilpech have been protesting against the pig farms, but in February 2023, they claim they were violently repressed by police who stormed a protest camp, beating those who were present. Other Maya communities have launched legal disputes against Kekén, the main pig flesh producer in the area. At least one of those was upheld by the Supreme Court. The federal Mexican environment ministry found that the watershed around Yucatán farms was saturated with nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations from the pigs’ faeces.
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