by Alex Evans | Aug 8, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
I’ve just been having another look at FAO’s seminal 2006 report about the environmental impact of meat consumption, Livestock’s Long Shadow. I figured I knew most of the stats about meat’s massive contribution to scarcity issues – but nope, I found myself astonished once again by the report’s headline stats. Livestock:
- Uses 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface for grazing, and 33% of the planet’s arable area for feedstock – in total, 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the land surface of the planet;
- Accounts for 70% of previously forested land in the Amazon (and that’s just the pasture – feedcrops are another big chunk again);
- Are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide equivalent – that’s larger than transport – and for 37% of methane emissions (23 times as potent as CO2 in its warming effect);
- Uses 8% of global human water use, mostly in irrigation for feedcrops, and is probably the single largest sectoral source of water pollution;
- Accounts for 20% of total terrestrial animal biomass – squeezing out space for other species and hence contributing massively to biodiversity loss, mainly through destroying habitats (30% of the land surface of the planet, remember)?
I love eating meat, but since I wrote The Feeding of the Nine Billion, I’ve been aiming to cut it out for 3 days a week. Having re-read FAO’s report, I’m going to up that to four or five – as ways of reducing your carbon footprint and wider environmental impact go, this is a very low hassle,high impact option (especially if you have Sophie Grigson on your shelf).
Also, if you haven’t seen coverage of Tristram Stuart’s new book on food waste, then take a look…
by Alex Evans | May 16, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
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.
