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The Live Animal Export Trade journal article

An Egregious Violation of the Public Trust?

Gary Lilienthal, Nehaluddin Ahmad, Faizan Mustafa

European Food and Feed Law Review, Volume 14 (2019), Issue 4, Page 347 - 364

The Australian Lot Feeders Association complains that animal welfare activists and airborne drones are probing their feedlotting practices. The object of this article will be to analyse critically the public interest in the export of live animals for purposes of destination market slaughter, with the industry’s corporate interests. According to former Australian High Court Chief Justice French, public decisions must be made lawfully, rationally, fairly and intelligibly. The question arises as to whether decisions in the export supply chain of live animals comply with these criteria, and does the live animal export trade constitute a major breach of public trust? The prevailing public view, and therefore the public interest, may be inferred from the available facts, suggesting that the live animals export industry is only apparently in conformance with an international regulatory system. Authorities appear to have taken the side of corporate live animal export interests, and their apparent desires for production efficiencies, distorting the public rhetoric to manipulate the public interest, and reducing the quality of humane treatment of animals. On board many ships, animals have been severely ill-treated and tortured, enduring suffering through high temperatures, a lack of fresh or sufficient air causing death, and the further painful suffering of deadly diseases. Although apparently lawful, the trade does not appear rational, fair or intelligible, thus amounting to a large-scale breach of the public trust. Keywords: Animal welfare; Feedlotting practices; Public interest; Animal slaughter; International regulatory system; Humane treatment of animals; Breach of the public trust.


Corporate Plant Breeders and Indigenous Farmers’ Rights: Linnaeus Overrides the F.A.O. journal article

Nehaluddin Ahmad, Gary Lilienthal, Paul Hodgkinson

European Food and Feed Law Review, Volume 13 (2018), Issue 5, Page 437 - 451

The Malaysian Government has been advised not to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants of 1991 (UPOV 1991), which favours developed countries’ corporate plant breeders, at the expense of Malaysian biodiversity and the country’s small farmers. The article examines critically the rights being manipulated within the underlying legal norms of statutory plant breeders’ rights, with resort to Hohfeld’s three elements of rights. The question is whether changing the name of a species of plant, after removing the plant from its native habitat, for trade purposes, could effectively extinguish farmers’ rights. Plants and seeds have been removed from their natural habitats, then renamed, violating farmers’ rights and misrepresenting them as crops owned by industrial farming interests. Malaysian rubber plants and seeds have been removed by deception from their natural indigenous habitats in Brazil, violating both farmers’ claimed, articulated and enforced customary and UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) rights, and then misrepresented as crops owned by the industrial farming interests of Europe. This system was legitimated in the self-deified and ennobled professional Botanist Linnaeus. Keywords: UPOV 1991; corporate plant breeders; biodiversity; Hohfeld on rights; the craft of deception; FAO rights; Linnaeus.

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