A federal study has found more than half of samples of ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef tested positive for strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, adding to fears that heavy use of antibiotics in livestock is giving rise to superbugs.

The report, published by the Food and Drug Administration in February, tested 480 samples each of ground turkey, pork chops, ground beef, and three cuts of chicken, all collected from U.S. supermarkets in 2011. The research received little attention until the Environmental Working Group combed through its findings and presented them in its own report, stating that according to the federal data, antibiotic resistant strains of salmonella and Campylobacteron were found in 81 percent of ground turkey, 69 percent of pork chops, 55 percent of ground beef and 39 percent of chicken wings, breasts and thighs. In addition, the EWG reported that the FDA study found 87 percent of the meat samples tested positive for Enterococcus bacteria, indicating that the meat had at one point come in contact with fecal matter.

The federal study’s results are perhaps unsurprising given the wealth of recent discoveries surrounding antibiotic use in livestock. A Pew Charitable Trusts report in February found the meat industry consumes 80 percent of antibiotics used in the U.S. — more than four times the amount of antibiotics taken by sick Americans. Antibiotics are used by the meat industry to promote faster growth and keep their animals, who are often crammed into factory farm facilities by the thousands, free of disease.

But the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria in meat is particularly disconcerting in light of evidence discovered last month that these superbugs can originate in animals and spread to humans. It also adds weight to the warnings of England’s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies, who said earlier this year that “antibiotics are losing their effectiveness at a rate that is both alarming and irreversible.”

In spite of its own findings, the FDA has so far done little to curb the meat industry’s use of antibiotics. The agency banned one class of antibiotics for use in poultry production in 2005 because of an “alarming” increase in the rate of resistance in bacteria, but a study from 2012 found evidence that the banned substances were still being used by some poultry farmers. And last year, instead of finally acting on an “Opportunity for a Hearing” notice it posted 34 years ago on the use of Penicillin and Tetracycline in animal feed, the FDA threw out the notice. As the EWG’s report notes, the administration opted instead to recommend antibiotic use in meat and poultry production “should be limited to those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health” and said using antibiotics to promote growth in livestock was “an injudicious use of these important drugs.” But its recommendations were just that — voluntary guidelines that have yet to carry any real weight.

On factory farms across the country, where animals tend to live in close quarters and diseases can spread quickly, the meat industry pumps its livestock full of antibiotics to fight the spread of bacteria. In fact, livestock consume four times the amount of antibiotics as sick Americans do — and even though the food industry maintains the practice is safe, new scientific research could definitively prove that wrong.

According to a new study published by researchers in Britain and Denmark, drug-resistant bacteria in animals can be transferred to humans. Researchers used genetic sequencing to study an outbreak of a bacterial disease on different farms in Denmark, and they were able to prove that the strain of bacteria that was sickening people actually originated in animals. The findings suggest that the meat industry’s practices could be directly exacerbating a growing global health threat, as an increasing number of diseases around the world — including whooping cough, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea — are beginning to develop a resistance to common antibiotics, signaling a future when even common infections may not be able to be treated.

Scientists have long suspected there may be a link between antibiotic resistance in animals and humans, but previous research hasn’t demonstrated it in quite as much detail before. Now that this study has been made public, however, policymakers are pointing to it as evidence that the FDA needs more regulatory oversight in this area of the meat industry. According to Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) — who recently introduced a measure to require food producers to disclose how often they’re feeding antibiotics to their animals, as well as to allow the FDA to collect more detailed information from drug companies — this new study “ends any debate” about whether giving antibiotics to livestock poses a health risk to humans.

Public opinion is on Slaughter’s side. The majority of Americans believe that antibiotics in food represent a health threat, and more than 60 percent of people say they would be willing to pay at least an additional five cents per pound for meat raised without antibiotics.

On Wednesday, the Senate passed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through September and avoid a government shutdown — and tucked into the 587-page bill are two brief provisions worth millions of dollars for large agribusinesses. The first blocks basic protections for livestock farmers already passed in the 2008 Farm Bill, effectively giving large meatpacking corporations free rein to manipulate the livestock market. The second exempts biotechnology giants like Monsanto and Dow from judicial review, allowing them to sell and plant genetically engineered crops even if a court of law orders them to stop.

These so-called “riders” often have little to do with the bill they piggyback, but special interests deploy them to avoid the scrutiny of the legislative process. A similar rider to deregulate the biotech industry quietly appeared in the stalled House Farm Bill last year. This time, agribusinesses took advantage of the urgency of averting the impending government shutdown on March 27. No lawmaker has come forward to claim responsibility for the riders.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MO), the Senate’s only working farmer, introduced two amendments to remove these “corporate giveaways,” but was not allowed to bring his amendments to a vote. Last week, Tester gave a fiery speech eviscerating the backdoor move to further consolidate power among a handful of corporations:

The House inserted a provision in the bill that gives enormous market power to America’s three largest meatpacking corporations while stiffing family farmers and ranchers. Family-run production agriculture faces tremendous market manipulation. Chicken farmers, hog farmers, and cattle ranchers all struggle to get a fair price from meatpackers. And if they fight back, they risk angering corporate representatives and being shut out of the market. Thanks to this provision, the Agriculture Department will not be able to ensure a fair, open market that puts the brakes on the worst abuses by the meatpacking industry. What’s worse is that the USDA took Congressionally-mandated steps to protect ranchers from market manipulation over the last few years. That’s what we told them to do in the 2008 Farm Bill. And this provision will actually overturn rules that USDA has already put in place. But apparently intense behind-the-scenes lobbying won out in the House of Representatives, and now we’re back to square one with big meatpackers calling the shots.

The second provision sent over from the House tells USDA to ignore any judicial ruling regarding the planting of genetically-modified crops. Its supporters are calling it the “farmer assurance” provision, but all it really assures is a lack of corporate liability. The provision says that when a judge finds that the USDA approved a crop illegally, the department must re-approve the crop and allow it to continue to be planted – regardless of what the judge says.

The “farmer assurance” rider addresses a 2010 controversy, in which a judge ordered a halt on planting Monsanto’s Roundup Ready beets until an environmental study could be conducted. The USDA ignored the judge’s ruling and allowed farmers to keep planting the beets without an environmental study. Nevertheless, the company unleashed a lobbying blitz of almost 6 million dollars on Washington. In summer of 2012, the farmer assurance rider popped up in the appropriations bill.

A group of major grocery retailers — including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Aldi — have pledged not to sell genetically engineered (GE) seafood if it’s approved in the U.S., Friends of the Earth announced Wednesday. The retailers are among more than 2,000 national and local grocery stores that have signed a pledge as part of the environmental group’s new campaign to push grocery stores to refuse to sell GE seafood.

The announcement comes as the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to approve what would be the first non-plant GE food to enter the U.S. market. AquAdvantage Salmon — which contain a Chinook salmon gene allowing the fish to grow about twice as fast as a wild Atlantic salmon — passed the FDA’s environmental assessment, which was released last year. Along with salmon, the Center for Food Safety reports that there are at least 34 other species of fish undergoing GE development around the world, including tilapia, trout and flounder.

The debate surrounding genetically modified foods, or GMOs, has intensified in recent months. Whole Foods announced earlier this month that it would label all GMO foods sold in Whole Foods stores by 2018, becoming the first national grocery store to set a timeline on GMO labeling. California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated GMO labeling in the state, was narrowly defeated in November, after food industry giants like Monsanto and Hershey poured $44 million dollars into an anti-Prop 37 campaign. Polling shows that more than 90 percent of consumers support GMO labeling, and a 91 percent of Americans don’t want GE meat and fish in the U.S. marketplace.

The grocery retailers’ pledges are encouraging, but they don’t make up for the FDA’s oversight in labeling GE salmon as environmentally sound. Opponents of GE seafood stress that not enough research has been done on its health effects, and that GE fish could pose an environmental threat if they escape into open waters. With their ability to grow more quickly than other salmon, GE salmon could out-compete wild salmon for food and space, and could potentially mate with wild seafood, weakening the wild species’ gene pool. AquAdvantage’s developer AquaBounty maintains that all of its salmon are grown as sterile females, but during a 2010 FDA hearing, AquaBounty clarified that 95 to 99 percent of its salmon were sterile — which means up to 750,000 of the eggs AquaBounty plans to grow could be fertile. On top of that, even farmed salmon that aren’t genetically modified pose potential health and environmental risks — they typically contain higher concentrations of PCBs, pesticides and other toxins; generate vast amounts of waste, which pollutes the water surrounding their pens and can harbor disease; and emit nearly as much greenhouse gasses as pork. GE farmed salmon will also carry all those risks.

There are still many other grocery retailers in the U.S. that haven’t signed the pledge, which means that if AquAdvantage salmon are approved, they will still find their way into the American market. The FDA hasn’t had much success with encouraging the food industry to self-regulate on its own, so the federal government will need a broader policy to limit Americans’ exposure to GMO foods — by labeling them or, in the case of GE salmon, by keeping them off shelves altogether.

Butterball was the subject of an undercover animal abuse video last year.

Such bills are touted — and, in some cases, sponsored — by agriculture industry officials as a lawful attempt to stop animal cruelty in farming operations. But they actually undermine advocates’ work to develop animal cruelty or food safety cases against the agricultural industry.

And it turns out the real basis for the bills has its origins in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank that has been behind such legislative pushes as “stand your ground” gun laws, voter ID laws and laws mandating states teach climate change denial in schools. Several of the lawmakers who are pushing ag gag laws have agriculture industry ties and ties to ALEC — nearly one in four Iowa lawmakers who voted for Iowa’s ag gag law, for example, are members of ALEC.

In 2002, ALEC introduced a piece of mock legislation titled the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, which labels people who interfere with any animal operations “terrorists” and made it illegal for anyone to enter “an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means with the intent to commit criminal activities or defame the facility or its owner.” ALEC began pushing the legislation in 2004, and several of the bills currently being considered borrow language from AETA — Indiana’s bill aims to keep farming operations “free from the threat of terrorism and interference from unauthorized third persons,” for instance. And ALEC continues to support these bills, as an ALEC spokesman told the AP:

“At the end of the day it’s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy,” said spokesman Bill Meierling. “You wouldn’t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.“

In fact, these proposed laws aren’t about personal property or privacy rights: they’re about consumers’ rights to know where their food comes from versus the agriculture industry’s desire to protect itself from negative press. Undercover videos have played a key role in exposing cruelty in some of the nation’s most well-known agriculture companies, and videos of sows crammed in gestation crates helped garner enough public outcry that McDonald’s announced it would phase-out gestation crates from its supply chain. But ag gag laws that require videos and photos to be immediately turned over to law enforcement, instead of delivered to the press, makes it doubtful that the public — the people who are consuming the meat, eggs and milk from these factory farms — will ever see them.

Six states already have ag gag laws on the books, and these laws have led to a chilling effect on advocacy groups’ investigations. If these new bills are passed, they would further close off the agriculture industry from the public eye — and we’ll have ALEC to partially thank for that.

As of Friday, Chinese officials have pulled 8,354 rotting pig carcasses out of the Huangpu River, eliciting fears of contamination of one of Shanghai’s major water sources. The cause of this dead pig flood is still a mystery, but many of the pigs have tested positive for a porcine circovirus, which does not affect humans. It seems likely that farmers upriver dumped the pigs in the river after they fell ill or died.

China has been cracking down on sick pigs in the food supply since two massively destructive outbreaks of diseased pork put the nation on alert. Farmers will sometimes sell diseased pigs to the black market in order to recoup some of their losses. On Wednesday, 46 men were jailed for selling diseased meat. This is far from rare; as the New York Times documents, 17 people were sent to prison in December for processing and selling meat from roughly 77,000 diseased pigs. In May, 4 others were arrested for selling dead pigs to slaughterhouses.

If farmers did indeed dump the sick pigs in the river, they may have been trying to avoid similar fates. While the dead pigs do not seem to pose a serious threat to the drinking water, they may indicate China’s food safety crackdown needs redirection. The sheer number of pigs suggests they were suffering from an epidemic. Since China has no system to compensate farmers for losses from disease, they are left to cope with the aftermath in whatever way they can afford:

“There is no mechanism by which, whenever diseases are found among pigs, the government compensates pig breeders so as to control the spread of diseases or compensate pig breeders for losses,” said Feng Yonghui, general manager at pig-industry research organization Soozhu.com.

To make matters worse, Feng said insurance companies were unwilling to insure pig breeders because the risks were so high.

While authorities have not confirmed a disease, or the death of unusually large numbers of pigs, talk of pigs dying would seem to suggest an outbreak of some sort.

One farmer in the Jiaxing area near Shanghai, 69-year-old Jiang Lie, said about 30 percent of his pigs had died of disease since January.

Reuters witnesses visited three reeking swine disposal pits in Jiaxing which appeared to have been just filled up and had signs saying they were at capacity.

In order to avoid such conditions, the U.S. established a Livestock Indemnity Program (LIP) that compensates farmers if their livestock falls prey to disease or extreme weather. The program is meant to encourage farmers to report diseases to the government rather than try to pass sick animals off as healthy. Payments range from $1 for a dead duckling to $1,000 for a dead dairy bull, at 65 percent of the market rate.

However, since the 2008 Farm Bill expired, LIP and 4 other farmer compensation programs ceased to exist after October 1. Farmers who lost livestock to Hurricane Sandy at the end of October were simply instructed by the USDA to keep good records of the losses in case disaster relief funding became available. The memo states, “Production losses due to disasters occurring after Sept. 30, 2011, are not eligible for disaster program coverage.” The Senate version of the 2012 Farm Bill included these programs, but the House’s refusal to pass the bill stymied renewal. The so-called fiscal cliff deal passed in January temporarily funded some livestock assistance programs for nine months, but efforts to secure this safety net through 2018 have stalled.

Conservatives attacked the inclusion of the livestock compensation programs as “wasteful” and called for their complete elimination in the next Farm Bill. China provides a grim example of the kinds of tactics farmers may turn to if conservatives get their way.