Protest at Wye environmental destruction
The river is being polluted by excessive chicken excrement being spread on the fields from intensive poultry units and then washed into the river when it rains. Cheap chicken is not cheap at all, but hides huge environmental costs and climate breakdown impacts. This practice is typical of international capitalism's business model that depends upon exploiting natural resources but avoiding paying the true costs.
Extinction Rebellion protest, July 25
We are looking at the end of the pristine river Wye and the region's valuable tourist industry.
But the story starts in the Amazon with the intimidation of its indiginous people forcing their displacement, and then the wanton destruction of the rain forest on which we all depend as our planet's lungs to remove CO2. Most of the cleared land is used to grow crops like soya destined for Europe and US as animal food. Cargill, the huge international company at the center of Indusrial Chicken production, shipped over one and a half million tons of this dirty soya to the UK between 2014 and 2020. It is distributed to animal food mills throughout the country.
Cargill, and their subsidiary Avara, drove a massive 20-year expansion of chicken factories in the Wye valley now housing more than 21 million birds. Their commercial practices were already poisonous to all of us. But the immediate problem for the Wye valley area is that it could not cope with the effects of the cheapest option of its waste disposal - spreading the chicken shit high in nitrogen phosphate direcly on the soil. When it rains the residue is washed into the river causing 80% of its pollution and destroying its ecology.
Local protestors have approached Tesco, which has the major retail market, asking them to enforce a higher production standard thereby requiring environmental protection of waste disposal. But they refused as then the chicken would cost a bit more.
Finally we have the abdication of UK Government to protect our environment. As George Monbiot says in his Guardian article : "After two decades of disastrous policies that turned its rivers into open sewers, Herefordshire county council, following a shift from Tory to independent control, finally did the right thing. It applied to the government to create a water protection zone, defending the River Wye against the pollution pushing it towards complete ecological collapse. But in a letter published last week, the UK’s environment minister, Rebecca Pow, refused permission, claiming it “would impose new and distinct regulatory obligations on the farmers and businesses within the catchment”. This is, of course, the point."