| Abstract |
Asia's livestock sectors are scaling up, supersizing and intensifying to meet soaring demand for high value animal sourced foods (ASF). This soaring growth in AFS consumerism in Asia is changing 'foodways' rapidly and bringing into focus the impacts of Asia's 'livestock revolution' on future generations and local or smallholder farmers, animal welfare and the environment. This discussion considers the evolving storyline in Asia through the lenses of narrative ethics to reveal underlying values and responsibilities, and concerns, costs and opportunities. Consequently, I suggest that policy makers across Asia and morally able citizens take up a conception of the public trust doctrine (PTD), namely, a public trust emphasis (PTE) for animal agriculture as a pivotal platform to mitigate the current impacts of the tragedy of plenty and to guide the future trajectory of animal agriculture. PTE can be an ethical catalyst to (re) invigorate or (re) seed fairness and social justice in the food chain. In helping policy makers and the public across Asia think about animal welfare and environmental sustainability specifically and PTE generally in more concrete terms, I recommend operationalizing social justice and risk issues into familiar ethical categories: Safety, Quality, Security, Humaneness and Sustainability. These categories form the basis of some of our basic or common ethical commitments about our contemporary food system and relationship to food and to each other and in turn generate action-guiding principles (namely, Responsibility-Responsiveness, Innovation-Partnership, Respect, Resilience/Stewardship, Diversity-interdependence), which subsequently can motivate a framework for both shared ethical governance, and ethically inspired business models. |