[VegChat] Stop eating meat to help stop climate change?

[Edelweiss D'Andrea]

Hard to swallow

  New research indicates that gas-guzzling cars are a much less important
  factor in climate change than the huge amounts of food devoured by
  carnivorous 'burger man'. 

  Jonathon Porritt on the geopolitics of food.

  Jonathon Porritt
  Wednesday January 04 2006
  The Guardian


  Of all the seasonal homilies about "green" Christmases and "sustainable"
  new year pledges - an oxymoron if ever I've heard one - only one stuck
  in my mind: each of us could make a bigger contribution to reducing
  emissions of greenhouse gases by becoming a vegan than by converting to
  an eco-friendly car.

  Researchers at the University of Chicago have calculated the relative
  carbon intensity of a standard vegan diet in comparison to a US-style
  carnivorous diet, all the way through from production to processing to
  distribution to cooking and consumption. An average burger man (that is,
  not the outsize variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2
  every year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in
  your conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your
  CO2 savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year.

  This may come as a bit of a shock to climate change campaigners. "Stop
  eating meat" is unlikely to be the favourite slogan of the new Stop
  Climate Chaos coalition. Even "eat less meat" might not go down too
  well, even though Compassion in World Farming has produced an utterly
  compelling explanation - in their report, Global Benefits of Eating Less
  Meat - of why this really is the way forward.

  The basic rule of thumb is that it takes 2kg of feed to produce every
  kilogram of chicken, 4kg for pork, and at least 7kg for beef. The more
  meat we eat, the more grain, soya and other feedstuffs we need. So when
  we hear that the total global meat demand is expected to grow from 209m
  tonnes in 1997 to around 327m tonnes in 2020, what we have to hold in
  our mind is all the extra hectares of land required, all the extra water
  consumed, the extra energy burned, and the extra chemicals applied to
  grow the requisite amount of feed to produce 327m tonnes of meat.

  Only a tiny proportion of those recently alerted to the threat of
  climate change would make any connection whatsoever between this and the
  food they eat. These are two entirely different zones of environmental
  reality - and getting one's head around climate change is proving to be
  enough of a challenge anyway.

   Mass awareness

  This year will undoubtedly be looked back on as the year when mass
  awareness at last kicked in - largely because it's been such a shocking
  year in terms both of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and of the
  spate of new research findings about accelerating impacts on both the
  Arctic and the Antarctic, on the Russian and Canadian permafrost, on the
  acidification of the oceans, and so on.

  It was also the year when the debate about how much oil is left in the
  ground bubbled up again, with oil trading at more than $60 a barrel for
  far longer than analysts imagined possible. The Goldman Sachs prediction
  that oil could reach $100 a barrel within the next decade didn't seem
  quite so daft any more.

  The relatively imminent prospect of finding ourselves living in a
  carbon-constrained oil-scarce world is, at long last, beginning to
  impact on government policymakers. But policymakers in the agricultural
  wing of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
  may well be the last to wake up to this - even though the climate change
  team is only just down the corridor. My Christmas reading included a
  brave new Vision for the common agricultural policy (CAP), produced by
  Treasury and Defra, presumably as part of their campaign to see off
  Jacques Chirac and his legions of French peasants. All in all, it's
  quite a good read, but the section on food security (defined as "an
  individual's access to enough food to maintain a healthy and active
  life") is astonishingly complacent.

  As far as our government is concerned, it apparently doesn't matter any
  longer where the food we buy comes from, as long as it meets minimum
  food safety and animal welfare standards. If our big retailers can
  source their produce from elsewhere in the world at lower costs than UK
  producers, what's the problem? In a global economy, where food is
  treated just like any other traded commodity, we may still need farmers
  (for the time being at least), but we don't necessarily need them based
  in the UK itself.

  Many people believe the government has got this one badly wrong. Food
  isn't "just another commodity", it is the foundation of personal
  wellbeing and is inextricably interwoven into a nation's culture,
  character and land use. In that regard, farming and food production
  embody a set of skills and capabilities on which the long-term security
  of any nation still ultimately depends.

  To demonstrate this, just add a few more geopolitical variables to the
  pot - on top of climate change and declining availability of oil. Just
  before Christmas, we heard that the Chinese economy grew by 16.5% last
  year - almost twice as fast as official figures. Oil imports have soared
  correspondingly, and will keep on rising. China is no longer
  self-sufficient in food. As meat consumption rockets (from 4kg per
  person 40 years ago to nearly 60kg today), so too do imports of grain
  and soya. Competition for land and water has never been fiercer;
  protests and riots over land use are now commonplace.

  At least China's population isn't growing much any longer, unlike that
  of India and many other countries. We are on track for a world
  population of around 9bn by the middle of this century - 6bn more than
  in 1950. Massive increases in food production and in average yields have
  just about kept up with population growth so far, but at huge cost to
  the environment. And there are few agricultural experts who think we can
  any longer sustain that kind of increased productivity.

  Then start mixing them all together. When oil starts trading at $100 a
  barrel, what happens to food production systems that are entirely
  dependent on cheap fossil fuels? How secure - let alone economically
  viable - will today's global supply chains prove to be when the worst
  effects of climate change begin to impact on food production all around
  the world? What will be the impact on food production of more and more
  governments using more and more of their land for energy crops and
  biofuels in order to address the problem of climate change? Worst
  nightmare

  Modelling these variables is a policy-maker's worst nightmare, but they
  absolutely cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, they barely feature in
  Defra's new vision, which seeks to persuade its readers that there is no
  alternative but to accelerate the globalisation of the food economy.
  "Complete self-sufficiency" is summarily dismissed, as if anyone is out
  there arguing for complete self-sufficiency anyway. What they are
  arguing for might be termed "cost-effective self-reliance", as a hedge
  against the growing threat of widespread ecological and social
  disruption - food security seen in terms of land use, quality,
  sustainability and food safety, not just temporary availability and
  access.

  And that means policies that do not leave our farmers gratuitously
  disadvantaged by overseas producers who care little for the state of the
  environment or animal welfare; policies that actively promote local
  sourcing, obliging our retailers to be as smart and creative about local
  supply chains as they are about global supply chains; policies that set
  out systematically to reduce carbon intensity in food production and
  distribution; policies that build on the excellent work already achieved
  through the public sector food procurement initiative, and the
  development of new agri-environment measures.

  It also means a rather different vision, acknowledging up front that a
  sustainable future for the UK depends on securing a thriving rural
  economy, and that this, in turn, depends on keeping sustainable food
  production absolutely at the heart of the rural economy. This may come
  as a bit of a surprise to some conservationists today, but the worst
  possible outcome for the British countryside and the global environment
  would be further reform of the CAP - ostensibly in the name of "more
  environment-friendly farming" - that resulted in more and more farmers
  going out of business. Which is precisely why we need a much more
  intelligent debate about food security than the one we're getting at the
  moment. 

   Jonathon Porritt is programme director of Forum for the Future and
  chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. His book,
  Capitalism As If The World Matters, is published by Earthscan Hardback.
  He will be speaking, with Ken Livingstone, Monty Don, Caroline Lucas and
  others, at the Soil Association's 60th anniversary conference in London
  on Friday and Saturday. Further information at:
  www.soilassociation.org/conference 


  Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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