Ron DeSantis promises to ‘protect meat’ from ESG

Image via The Associated Press.

In South Carolina , Gov. Ron DeSantis offered meaty remarks, suggesting that environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) would be cooked if he were elected President.

During a Never Back Down tour stop in Greenville, the 2024 presidential candidate said he would “protect meat” from ESG principles, which he said would cause a “farm crisis” given the pressures being imposed on the agricultural sector.

“They’re trying to use things like global warming to go after agriculture. They want to go after meat, they want to go after all these things and it’s totally insane,” DeSantis said.

The Governor noted that Florida had made moves against ESG, before continuing to underscore the problem as he sees it.

“They want to judge people based on, like, carbon footprint and all this. So they’re going to hammer agriculture with it and they’re going to make, basically, farmers change the way they farm in ways that honestly, it’s going to produce a farm crisis in this country and it’s going to be, yeah, it’s going to be a total disaster. So I am 100% on board with agriculture, to stop the madness to protect meat, to protect farming practices and to leave ESG in the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said.

These are just the Governor’s latest comments in defense of the livestock sector.

The Governor, while at a Never Back Down bus tour stop in Iowa back in August, said his presidential administration would not “let California regulate how farmers in Iowa conduct their business on things like, you know, these pork producers have to follow California law to do this stuff.”

“It doesn’t even make any sense,” DeSantis said.

Earlier this year, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a California law called Proposition 12, which mandates more room for breeding pigs. The Court sided with the state against the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, industry groups that contended California law would impose unreasonable burdens on pig farmers.

The California law holds “no person shall knowingly engage in a commercial sale within the state of whole pork meat for human food if the whole pork meat is the product of a breeding pig, or the product of the immediate offspring of a breeding pig, that was confined at any time during the production cycle for said product in an enclosure that fails to comply with all of the standards set forth in Chapter 10, Article 3, regarding Breeding Pigs.”

This includes pig meat brought in from out of state, meaning California markets would be closed to flesh from slaughtered pigs treated worse than state law requires.

California statute dictates that the “enclosure shall allow the breeding pig to lie down, stand up, fully extend limbs, and turn around freely,” with “a minimum of 24 square feet of usable floorspace per breeding pig.” But that’s a bridge too far for the purveyors of porcine flesh.

The National Pork Producers Council has denounced the standards as “arbitrary” and “unconstitutional,” and DeSantis’ position accords with that industry group.

Ironically given the Governor’s take, more than two decades ago Florida passed a constitutional amendment stipulating that “no person shall confine a pig during pregnancy in a cage, crate or other enclosure, or tether a pregnant pig, on a farm so that the pig is prevented from turning around freely, except for veterinary purposes and during the prebirthing period.”