There’s an ecologically-devastating element to Goldman Sachs’
investments that has not and probably will not be mentioned in
Congressional hearings about the company’s (other) wrongdoings: The firm
not only finances factory farms, but is actively helping to expand
their use in countries not already overcrowded with their environmental
pollution and animal
cruelty.

Mia MacDonald of Brighter Green
has a must-read post about this problem over at
HuffPost. She explains that in 2008, Goldman “decided to acquire
ten intensive poultry farms in China’s Hunan and Fujian provinces for
$300 million. While Goldman isn’t running the farms itself (that’s
outsourced) it retains control over the prices.”

The implications are frightening—factory
farms in the U.S. spill billions of pounds of manure into the
environment everyday, 80 percent of agricultural land in the U.S. is
used to raise animals for food and grow grain to feed them, and
production of one pound of beef requires 14 times the amount of water
needed to grow a pound of wheat, and 200 times the
amount needed to grow potatoes.