What’s your fair share of meat? Alex Evans
May 16, 2009 | More on Climate and resource scarcity | 2 comments
Food historian Tristram Stuart has a piece in the Guardian this morning asking the question: what’s one person’s fair share of meat consumption?
After all, meat (especially red meat) and dairy products have a disproportionate impact on climate change – the livestock industry is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions – as well as on land use, grain consumption, water consumption and other issues besides. So if by now we’re all used to the idea that we can quantify our carbon footprint and compare it to what our personal share would be if we had a safe global emissions budget that was shared out equitably between the world’s people, then what would the meat equivalent - the sustainable ‘Big Mac footprint’, if you like – work out at?
As Tristram acknowledges, it’s not as straightforward as ‘meat bad, vegetables good’, given that
no two pieces of meat are the same. A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry. Likewise, countries have very different animal husbandry methods. For example, in the US, for each calorie of meat or dairy food produced, farm animals consume on average more than 5 calories of feed. In India the rate is a less than 1.5 calories. In Kenya, where there isn’t the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans.
Nonetheless, encouraged by the declaration of a meat-free day a week in Ghent, Tristram’s got his calculator out and made a guesstimate of the kind of consumption changes we might be talking about. Here’s the deal:
Global average consumption of meat and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda’s was 45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production, rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7 times – and this doesn’t include the fact that the butter will have to be spread even more thinly if the global population really does increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.
However, still further reductions would be necessary because global meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy consumption are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to take its share of the hit. For rich western countries this would mean decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.
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That red meat necessarily has a greater climatic impact than white meat is a common misconception. Yes, ruminants (cows, sheep, and goats) convert feed energy into animal protein energy much less efficiently than monogastrics (pigs and poultry), and, yes, lifecycle analyses, which look at the total emissions generated from production through to consumption, also consistently show ruminants to have a heftier emissions hoofprint. But, such studies, while capturing inputs such as feeds and fertilisers, do not reliably account for emissions arising from the ‘second-order’ land-use changes, such as deforestation, caused by producing animal feeds. Pigs and poultry are far more dependent on cereal-feed than ruminants. As they cannot survive on grazing pasture alone (unlike cows, sheep, and goats), they are implicitly responsible for greater land-use change impacts. This makes the GHG picture between different types of livestock more complex than the simple ‘beef bad, chicken better’ message suggests.
On the size of consumption changes necessary, it has previously been suggested in the Lancet that, simply to prevent an increase in emissions from livestock, global meat consumption should be reduced to just less than 33 kg per person per year by 2050 under a system of contraction and convergence.
For more on these issues see http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/climate_change/bp_4aweek.html
Your recent posts on climate change and sustainability have been informative and thought-provoking, especially this last article, which forces us to re-evaluate meat consumption as having effects that expand beyond the individual to the society at large. I am currently working at Meatless Monday, a public health non profit initiative that focuses on this very idea of cutting back meat consumption to not only benefit the individual in terms of physical health but also the society, through the reduction of carbon emissions. For the history and science behind the campaign check out Meatless Monday’s Youtube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpnKeYmR1NM.