"Mexico is a leading international pork producer, but Yucatán residents say the waste oozing from hundreds of enormous hog farms is destroying the environment"
"The stink of excrement was the first thing the residents of Sitilpech noticed when the farm opened in 2017. It hung over the colourful one-storey homes and kitchen gardens in the Maya town in Yucatán, and has never left. Next, the trees stopped bearing fruit, their leaves instead covered with black spots. Then, the water from the vast, porous aquifer emerged from the well with a horrible, overwhelming stench.
“Before, we used that water for everything: for cooking, for drinking, for bathing. Now we can’t even give it to animals. Today, we have to give the chickens purified water because otherwise they get diarrhoea,” says one resident. “The radishes grow thin and the coriander often turns yellow. This has always been a quiet town, where life was very good until that farm started,” they say.
Sitilpech lies on the edge of the Ring of Cenotes, a vast network of sinkhole lakes and underground rivers formed by a meteorite impact 66m years ago. The pig mega-farm is just under a kilometre from the first home in the town. It is part of a network of between 500 and 800 facilities that have appeared across Yucatán peninsula in the past 20 years, often nestled in the middle of the internationally important Yucatán moist forest. A mega-farm can hold up to 50,000 pigs, packed tightly together in small pens. The urine and excrement, antibiotics and hormone treatments seep out beneath their corrals, and are then dried in open-air waste lakes in the tropical heat."
Patricio Eleisegui and Patrick Greenfield report for the Guardian November 25, 2024.
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