Everybody wants cheap food. But now, many people are worried about the real costs of this. Food is grown and made cheaply because many of the real costs get left out. They are 'externalised': missed out of the cost calculation. Here are some examples:

• Cheap food depends on using huge machines to culitvate and harvest crops, more machines to process them and more again to transport them. These machines use a lot of fuel and all the exhaust gases get dumped - pollution - into the air we all breathe. Small family farms can't afford to buy expensive machines so they go out of business.
• On factory farms, animals are treated not as living creatures, but 'production units' because it's cheaper that way. The pollution from factory farms affects streams, rivers and even the sea and coral reefs.
• Then there's pesticides. These may kill pests but they too can seriously pollute water supplies under the ground: often your drinking water. This water has to be cleaned up before it can be used. That's expensive to do and should be paid for as part of the cost of 'cheap' food. But it isn't and so people have to pay higher prices for their water supplies - or drink polluted water.
• Finally, there's the thorny problem of subsidy. This is where governments give money to farmers to grow crops. This makes food artificially cheap so that it can be sold cheaply in other parts of the world, undercutting poor or unsupported farmers and driving them out of business. Most rich countries subsidise their farming industries but they like to pretend they don't. Why? Because subsidising agriculture is supposed to be against the rules of international trade.

Would you believe it? Farming in the richest nations (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries), got an incredible US$361 billion in subsidies in 1999 Third World Network Rich countries spend enough on susidising their farmers to fly every single cow in the West around the world first class [1] And where does that money come from? You! You (or your parents) pay taxes - and that's where the subsidies come from.

If the costs of stopping air and water pollution, treating the animals kindly and cleaning up factory farms before they cause pollution were paid as part of the true costs of 'cheap' food, it wouldn't be cheap at all.

For more on factory farms, click the pig image to visit the GRACE Factory Farm Project.

Visit PETA if you're concerned about the way some people treat animals.

To find out more facts and figures, visit

• the Union of Concerned Scientists: The Costs and Benefits of Industrial Agriculture Scroll down until you hit "The Costs of Industrial Agriculture" section
• the Centre for Environment and Society's The Real Cost of Farming
• CIWF "Eat less meat – It’s costing the earth"