Drugs, hormones and excrement: the polluting pig mega-farms supplying pork to the world

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.

For those that live around them, the spread of the pig mega-farms is a human and ecological disaster. Some Maya villages in Yucatán are outnumbered by pigs 100 to one. In the rainy season, the farms pump out the pig waste through sprinkler systems; it oozes into the porous limestone watershed which connects the Ring of Cenotes. Local people say that those who drink the tap water fall sick, and there are severe consequences for the area’s biodiversity.

“More than 90% of the 800 pig factories estimated to exist in Yucatán operate without any type of environmental permit,” claims Lourdes Medina Carrillo, an environmental lawyer. “These are projects without a record of prior Indigenous consultation, arising from the destruction of forests considered the second most important on the continent, without permits for changes in land use, and with impacts such as water contamination,” she claims.

For many residents, the anger is directed at the Mexican pork brand Kekén, the country’s largest pork exporter. Animals supplied to the brand are sold all over the world, feeding markets in South Korea, Japan and the US. Kekén is part of the Kuo Group conglomerate, which includes companies in the automotive and chemical industry. It generated revenue of more than $1.9bn (£1.5bn) last year, with half coming from the pork division.

The push into this region of Mexico started with the Nafta free trade agreement but accelerated in the early 2000s after the US health authorities declared Yucatán a zone free of classical swine fever. Export restrictions on pork were removed, and companies quickly moved to take advantage.

As the impact of the mega-farms has grown, residents in Sitilpech have resisted them, forming protests in 2023 against the facilities. But in February 2023, they say they were violently repressed by police who stormed a protest camp, beating those present. Other Maya communities have launched legal disputes against Kekén. At least one of those was upheld by the supreme court, after residents of Homún brought a case detailing “grave and irreversible harm to human health and the environment” caused by a 48,000-pig farm, including “contamination of water … emission of noxious air pollution; the spread of dangerous pathogens”.

“When the company came to settle, we saw how it sadly began to cut down the trees that we take care of so much for beekeeping. They left large areas of devastated land,” allege members of a family from Kinchil, an hour from Yucatán’s capital Mérida. “It was very sad. They cut down trees that were more than 100 years old, which are the ones that benefit us the most when there is drought,” they claim.

At the beginning of last year, the federal Mexican environment ministry found that the watershed around farms in Yucatán was saturated with concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus from the pigs’ excrement.

Analysis of water sample from cenotes, springs and wells in Yucatán by scientists, the communities themselves and the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris) has found contamination by E coli and other bacteria. Communities reported an increase in cases of intestinal infections in Yucatán between 2012 and 2019, a period of pig farm expansion.

In response, a spokesperson for Kekén says it specialises in pork production of the highest quality and is one of the biggest employers in the Yucatán region. The company says it uses biodigesters to ensure the most efficient water uses, adding that 90% of its facilities are in protected areas for the conservation of biodiversity. They said they provided a range of benefits for local people, including supporting farming in nearby Maya communities.

“The medications, the hormones they give to the pigs, in addition to their excrement, end up in the water. And that water that the industry uses then travels inside the caves, the caverns, the wells through the Ring of Cenotes. This is the common water that nature and communities use for their supply. This pollution breaks all ecological balances, impacts native fauna and flora, causes loss of biodiversity and even an excess of organic matter,” says Medina Carrillo.

“This is an extremely serious problem because the aquifer of the peninsula, the wells and cenotes, are interconnected,” she says.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, said during her campaign that she would not promote the closure of mega-farms in Yucatán. “I understand that there are regulations for pig farms, there is technology to avoid contamination … the issue is that the regulations are complied with,” she declared in a press conference in March. “This idea that mega-farms must be closed because they pollute, no. There is technology.”