Friends of the Earth and Compassion in World Farming released a new report, Eating the Planet?, this week and celebrated that, according to their research “We can eat meat, ditch factory farming and save the planet”.

FoE have always been a little shy about telling people they need to change the way they live, preferring to ask them to sign a postcard to their MP instead. So I was happy to receive an email from FoE to tell me that they had at last tackled the issue of meat consumption with their latest report and that the “focus is on reducing daily meat and dairy consumption”.

However, the press release tells a different story. It seems the message they are desperate to tell people is that we can eat meat, not that we need to cut down. On their home page right now is the message “eat meat and save the planet - we don’t have to go vegetarian”. They’re actually telling people to eat meat. When Lorn Stern said people should consider going vegetarian for the environment, Friends of the Earth reacted very defensively and told him via the Times that “by leaping to the conclusion that we should all go vegetarian, your reports didn’t address the urgent need for it to clean up its act to be part of our low-carbon future”.

The other problem is that their report looked only at global production and consumption, not at what is feasible on a local level. I asked them if they thought people in the UK could eat meat 3 times per week (with humane, extensive, organic systems) and not have to import any meat, dairy or animal feeds from elsewhere, and they couldn’t answer that question; they said they hoped that would be the case but that they could only answer this question after more research had been conducted.

I don’t understand it, they talk about localisation of food systems and then use a report which analyses global food production to tell people in the UK what they should eat. They commission a report which shows that we need to reduce meat and dairy consumption but they seem to be actively against people going vegetarian. It makes no sense.

Friends of the Earth, who are running campaign to address the impact of animal agriculture on the planet, named the Food Chain campaign, have responded to Lord Stern’s “go veg” message that hit the press yesterday.

Sir, Lord Stern of Brentford is right to highlight the meat and dairy industry’s vast and often-overlooked contribution to climate change, but by leaping to the conclusion that we should all go vegetarian, your reports didn’t address the urgent need for it to clean up its act to be part of our low-carbon future (“Climate chief: give up meat to save the planet,” Oct 27).

Cutting down on meat will clearly deliver a win-win for the health of people and the planet, but livestock is a vital part of many people’s diets and livelihoods around the world so we can’t simply scrap it.

At the moment the Government pumps millions of pounds of public money into factory farms and subsidises the use of imported animal feed that is grown after forests have been destroyed. Meanwhile, our own farming sector is in crisis with more than 4,000 job losses in the sector each year and farmers struggling to get a fair price from the supermarkets.

It is possible to farm meat and dairy without it trashing the planet — but we need urgent action to make this happen. The Government should be supporting planet-friendly farms and home-grown animal feeds and, ultimately, less but better meat and dairy. In the run-up to crucial UN climate talks this December, rich countries such as the UK must show real leadership — and fixing the food chain is an important part of this.

Clare Oxborrow
Friends of the Earth

Again the emphasis is on “home-grown animal feeds”. Again I ask, in land scarce UK, where will we find the land for this? At least they mention that we should eat less meat and dairy, but they seriously need to get over their fear of tackling the issue of consumption head on.

A new investigation again shows the damaging impact of cheap factory farmed meat sold in Europe because of it’s total reliance on soy from Latin America as animal feed. Soy plantations not only result in mass deforestation but also horrific human rights abuses as indigenous people are poisoned and forced from their land. From the Ecologist website:-

Cheap meat has become a way of life in much of Europe, but the full price is being paid across Latin America as vast soya plantations and their attendant chemicals lead to poisonings and violence.

Much of the cheap meat and dairy produce sold in supermarkets across Europe is arriving as a result of serious human rights abuses and environmental damage in one of Latin America’s most impoverished countries, according to a new film launched in conjunction with the Ecologist Film Unit.

An investigation in Paraguay has discovered that vast plantations of soy, principally grown for use in intensively-farmed animal feed, are responsible for a catalogue of social and ecological problems, including the forced eviction of rural communities, landlessness, poverty, excessive use of pesticides, deforestation and rising food insecurity.

The investigation is part of Friends of the Earth Europe’s Feeding and Fuelling Europe programme, in collaboration with other groups including Friends of the Earth members in the Netherlands, Paraguay, UK, Uruguay, the Ecologist magazine, Via Campesina and Food and Water Watch.

Friends of the Earth Food Campaigner Kirtana Chandrasekaran explains in the film that we need to stop factory farming for meat and dairy, use home grown feeds and more extensive methods of farming and direct subsidies for factory farming in to “better quality” farming.

The UK is a land-scarce country. As the population keeps growing and communities around the country fight to save the last of our wild areas from new road and housing developments, how will we find the land to be able to grow more food to feed animals? Consumption of meat and dairy has to be tackled but no-one seems to have the guts to say it.

See the 10 minute film and read the full article on the Ecologist website: www.theecologist.org/trial_investigations/336873/killing_fields_the_true_cost_of_europes_cheap_meat.html

WWF are about to release a report which urges people to cut down on meat and dairy for the sake of the environment.

According to a Daily Mail article, WWF want meat and dairy to be labelled with a warning; meat labels should read ‘1 of 3 a week max’ and milk and cheese labels should say ‘1 of 3 a day max’. According to WWF, we are over-consuming red meat by 70% and dairy by 40%.

The idea of warning labels on meat is not new. Organisations concerned about the health impacts of meat have proposed this many times. But with both health and environmental concerns becoming increasingly urgent, maybe now is the right time.

It’s also interesting to note that Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn is vegetarian. Also, Jane Kennedy resigned from her post as Minister for Food, Farming and the Environment last month and has now been replaced by another vegetarian, Jim Fitzpatrick, who also opposes hunting. This is brilliant news, especially since Kennedy refused to take any personal responsibility for her consumption habits. Read what she had to say in March about the impact of animal agriculture here.

With the most recognised and powerful international environmental groups; WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, all now adding their voice to the message that we must cut down on meat and dairy consumption, surely it’s time for change.

In the US the Meatless Monday idea has been around for a while, it’s always been about health in the past, but they’ve just updated their website and the focus seems to have shifted - now the aims are to reduce Americans’ meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.

Now Paul McCartney and his daughters have brought the concept to the UK, under the name Meat Free Mondays. It’s a brilliant way to get people started on the journey towards vegetarianism, I hope people do move on from one day a week to 7 days a week once they realise how easy it is!

The Meat Free campaign has got the support of celebrities such as Chris Martin, Hollywood stars Kevin Spacey and Woody Harrelson, Joanna Lumley, Sir Richard Branson, Ricky Gervais, David Walliams and Matt Lucas, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, Kelly Osbourne, Laura Bailey and Sharleen Spiteri. The campaign was launched 15 June in London with a private celebrity lunch.

Friends of the Earth speedily sent out a press release this week to say they “welcomed the Meat Free Mondays initiative… but are urging the Government to change the way meat and dairy are produced to tackle the damaging environmental and social impacts of intensive production”. There is a place for Government lobbying, but how can we ask the Government to act before we can show we really care about this? Changing our consumer behaviour is about creating change by changing demand, but also about proving our committment to the Government, so they will change their policies too.

Friends of the Earth released a report today to expose the vast amounts of public money - over £700 million per year - used to support factory farming in England. In their report, Feeding the Beast, they say “Factory farming for meat and dairy is at the heart of a hidden chain that links the food on our plates to rainforest destruction in South America. To make them grow quickly and produce high yields, animals in factory farms are being pumped full of imported soy crops – creating demand for vast plantations that are wiping out forests and forcing communities off their lands in South America”.

A spokesperson from the National Farmers Union said, “We have nothing against small scale, low output, farming systems but to suppose this is a model which will feed the world’s growing population is disingenuous. Either Friends of the Earth is looking to use much more of the world’s land area for farming – which really would put wilderness and rainforest at risk – or it imagines that, in some way or other, the world’s population is going to be dramatically smaller.”

Of course, the NFU don’t want to consider the third option; that people switch to a plant-based diet. Simon Fairlie, co-editor of the Ecologist, made an analysis of different agricultural systems in his article ‘Can Britain Feed Itself?’, published in his magazine The Land. He calculated that with a vegan permaculture system, we could not only feed everyone but we’d also have 8.8 million hectares of land spare.

The word seems to be getting around; meat and dairy is bad for the environment. Hamburger lovers had better watch out, their days are numbered! There are blogs and campaigns popping up all over the place urging people to reconsider their meat eating habits. Here’s a selection of what’s going on:-

A couple of great blogs
Price of Meat
Meat the Facts

New group
Save the Human is a new group formed in Hong Kong, with a brilliant video. They have a Facebook group and are working on a new website.

New campaigns
PETA’s ‘Meat’s Not Green’ campaign started this week, with a video and one of their usual saucy demonstrations!

Viva! have launched their Eat Green campaign. Their website has lots of great resources and they have a postcard campaign urging Gordon Brown to stop importing soy to feed animals, since it is destroying the rainforests.

Friends of the Earth launched their Food Chain campaign a few months ago; it’s early days, but this is set to be one of their major campaigns.

Greenpeace have been running a soy campaign for some time, but are now turning their attention to cattle grazing in the Amazon. They have not launched a campaign yet, but watch this space!

For information on some more long running groups and campaigns, check out the ‘groups‘ page under ‘resources‘.

Over the last two days, environmental groups, MEPs and UN representatives have been taking part in the International Conference on Global Europe, hosted by the European Parliament in Brussels. The title of this year’s conference was ‘Living Beyond its Resources: Impacts of ‘Global Europe’ on Sustainable Development’.

As I tuned in to the live web stream during the session titled ‘Global Europe - Fuelling Europe: A Trade-off between Energy Security and Sustainability?’, I was pleased to hear a representative from the World Society for the Protection of Animals point out that we need to not only look at our levels of consumption but also the type of goods we consume. She gave the example that it takes 10,000 litres of water to produce 1 litre of milk and 10kg of grain to produce 1kg of meat.

Unfortunately, the panel mostly ignored this point. Most of the discussion centred around biofuels. Paul Hodson, Deputy Head of Unit, DG Transport and Energy for the European Commission, pointed out that when crops like wheat and maize are used to make biofuels, the part of the plant that cannot be used to make fuel can be used as animal feed. He used this as an arguement to support biofuels, claiming that this increase in animal feeds, as a by-product of the biofuels industry, would help the EU to reduce its dependency on imported soy - which is hugely damaging to the environment and uses much more land than other crops to produce the same amount of feed.

A British biofuels company, Ensus, explain on their website, that the ‘co-product’ of biofuels has ‘high level of protein, coupled with an amino acid profile that is well suited to the nutritional needs of a variety of animals’.

Why is the priority here feeding animals rather than the 840 million starving people in the world? I am sure many starving families in the world would be very grateful to receive some high protein food. I find this very disturbing.