Turkey’s import meat hazardous to both humans and animals

A journalist and animal rights activist brings forward the issue, and explains the inhuman conditions animals are held in
Wednesday, 21 February 2018 04:13

 

Turkey’s policy to import red meat comes to another toxic turn. It was demonstrated by Zülal Kalkandelen, an animal rights activist and a journalist, that the animals currently being imported to Turkey by ships from Brazil are contained under horrible conditions, covered with their own urine and faeces, which is terrible for both animal and human health.

Kalkandelen explained that the animals were carried in open-top haulages for 500 kilometres for 4 days, and covered with their own faeces. Then, they were transferred to ships, where they remain under the same conditions, but this time for much longer, until they arrive in Turkey. The animals who get sick and die during the journey are digested with a special grating machine, and dropped into the ocean.

But why did Turkey, a country covered with greenery in its many regions, and was once able to do its own husbandry, even start to import meet in the first place?

A public body, the Meat and Fish Organisation, used to support, advance money to, and buy animals from stockbreeders in the regions of East and Southeast Anatolia, which are the two regions in Turkey most available for productive husbandry.

As a step to comply with neo-liberal policies which were in effect since 1980’s, the organisation was privatised in large part in 1993, and in the following years, closed its many branches, discharged almost all of its skilled labourers, and it eventually came to the point of non-functionality. Then, in 2006, the organisation was back to being socialised, and started to launch new branches under the new name of Meat and Milk Organisation.

During these years, the governments ruling Turkey started to zone meadows and grasslands for construction. This led to an inevitable fall in husbandry, resulting in that even the reconstructed organisation for meat and milk was practically equal to nothing. The main function of the organisation today is defined as "to buy, sell, import if necessary, process, produce and contain by-products of, and to sell and utilise in domestic and foreign markets the butchery animals, meat, fish, and the fowl."