Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Karen Hudlet Vazquez

Location: Mexico
Primary academic field: Human geography
Award category: PhD Student

Guidance Memo

• Title: Interconnected violences and interconnected resistances: Alliances for resisting meat factories in the Americas.
• How to cite: Karen Hudlet Vázquez. Interconnected violences and interconnected resistances: Alliances for resisting meat factories in the Americas. Tiny Beam Fund, 27 July 2024, https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.44040.
• What We Learned From It: Human rights, environmental, food sovereignty, animal rights/ vegan organizations in Latin America and the U.S. hoping to form alliances to resist mega meat factories and the meat industry need to understand and accept the fact that the way other groups view food systems and issues such as

  economic development, justice, technology can be very different from their own.

  • Given mega meat farms' multiple negative impacts on humans and non-human animals, it is no surprise they face opposition from different actors, including those in Latin America.
  • These actors (e.g., local communities, indigenous people, food movements, vegans, environmentalists), all want to stop factory farming. But their approaches to meat production and (non) consumption differ in myriad and significant ways. Therefore, one cannot assume they are all natural allies or pursuing a common vision. Potential tensions between them are real.
  • To understand how these organizations in Latin America and the U.S. can form alliances and networks, it is necessary to comprehend the different lens through which these diverse organizations view the meat industry – perspectives that are influenced by how they look upon issues such as economic development, justice, and technology.
  • One also needs to be aware of the full repertoire of their actions which are in turn shaped by the unique goals of each organization.
  • There are also dissimilarities in how they perceive food systems and what they consider to be good food.

    • Human rights, environmental, and food sovereignty groups regard agribusiness as a form of extractivism; they denounce the uneven distribution of the harms and benefits of the industrial food system.

    • Vegan and animal rights organizations focus on the commodification of animals and violence done to them, but may not be concerned with other aspects in the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex such as feed production.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• This project has exceptional practical value. Its findings and recommendations can be adopted for use right away.
• It will show how NGOs' approaches to meat production and meat consumption reduction differ in myriad and significant ways. Even within environmental justice, there are different areas of focus. Tactics and strategies also differ. One cannot assume all NGOs are natural allies with a single common vision. There are potential tensions, but also opportunities for learning.