No, hell hasn’t frozen over and this isn’t some kind of a sick joke. It was announced today that McDonald’s Europe has launched an ‘initiative’ designed to promote and share the benefits of sustainable farming practices with its European suppliers and outlying farming communities. I mean, who knows more about sustainability than McDonalds right?
Old McDonald’s Has Some Farms
The program is called Flagship Farms and has been developed along with the Food Animal Initiative (FAI), an Oxford-based organization whose aim is to integrate animal welfare practices into commercial farming; though these two elements by nature are somewhat mutually exclusive. The idea of the program is to showcase innovative farming techniques being used by a handful of the almost 500,000 European farmers that supply McDonald’s. They will do this by highlighting seven Flagship Farms from across Europe selected to be prime examples of the “sustainable” and “innovative” practices the program feels are worth emulation by others in the industry.
While McDonald’s scheme certainly appears to be yet another corporate greenwash of sorts, some of it’s Eurpoean suppliers are indeed models for sustainable and ethical farming techniques. One of the Flagship Farms, based in the U.K., is a poultry farm run by David Brass who supplies McDonald’s with about 25 million eggs every year sourced from his own free-range (but not organic) flock of 48,000 chickens. In the last 18 months, David has planted over 100,000 trees on his farm as he believes it increases the productivity of his free-range birds. McDonald’s Europe chief supply chain officer states:
“There’s very little science behind free range egg production. We want to change that and prove to people that these things do work and benefit the bottom line. With Flagship Farms, it’s nice to be able to learn from other farmers and improve what they’re doing as well.”
A Clown Is Their Spokesman For A Reason
The above is certainly all well and good, but when you’re talking about a company like McDonald’s, your dealing with economies of enormous scale. Granted, they have maybe a few dozen farms that could be considered sustainable, humane, etc. by somewhat rigorous standards, but the vast majority of the 500,000 farms supplying McDonald’s Europe, and hundreds of thousands of others supplying McDonald’s worldwide, are your typical environmental and animal welfare industrial nightmares. If they were otherwise, McDonald’s certainly wouldn’t be able afford to serve up all those $1 menu delights that people flock to like heroin addicts.
McDonald’s seems to almost revel in touting the embarrassingly obvious contradictions within itself. On one hand, they create the Ronald McDonald House as a charity to treat sick and ill kids, but on the other hand they market and serve the very food that makes many of them sick (diabetes, obesity, etc.) and requiring treatment in the first place. Similarly, their Flagship Farms program is designed to promote the very methods of sustainable farming that company’s like McDonald’s insure stay marginalized and comparatively uncompetitive in the marketplace.
After reading through this release, it became fairly obvious to me that this new found focus on ’sustainable farming’ was McDonald’s way of establishing some false ‘green cred’ by taking advantage of the vagaries regarding the details of their program and its stated objectives. There is zero mention of anything remotely related to organic farming or practices which is the key to any successful, truly sustainable, farming or agricultural program.
Though the general public associates the word “sustainable” with environmental consciousness, McDonald’s definition of the term seems to lean more towards the production side of things. “Sustainable farming” for McDonald’s are the practices that will ensure high production and continued delivery of food products while keeping the financial bottom line at the forefront. If some of these practices are more environmentally/animal friendly than others; great. If not, well, that’s fine as long as they can keep getting what they need. The point is, sustainability to McDonald’s means adopting farming methods that keep their cash cows alive and healthy long enough to lead them to slaughter and end up in your value meal. If in the process some trees get planted and some pens are opened up then that’s fine, but make no mistake about it, McDonald’s top priorities still lie with keeping their shareholders happy; not their food animals.
The Good: Like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s sheer scale could work to the environment and the animals’ advantage. Even if a fraction of their suppliers end up adopting some actual sustainable farming practices as a result of the Flagship Farms program, it would still be a fairly large number.
The Bad: The Flagship Farms program is a thinly veiled attempt by McDonald’s to try and jump on the sustainability bandwagon while at the same time trying to distract people from the fact that the company itself is a classic example of why industrialized farming exists in the first place.
The Bottom-Line: You can put green makeup and a green wig on a clown; but it’s still a clown.
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