The Financial Times today reports on a new United Nations report, The State of Food and Agriculture, which recommends a tax on livestock emissions.

The novel suggestion by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation to use taxation comes as campaigners focus on the impact on climate change of emissions of methane from cattle, sheep and pigs.

“Market-based policies, such as taxes and fees for natural resource use, should cause [livestock] producers to internalise the costs of environmental damages,” the FAO said in its annual report, The State of Food and Agriculture .

“The sector is consuming a large share of the world’s resources and is contributing a significant portion of global greenhouse gases emissions,” the report adds.

The proposal, if supported by governments, could hit companies such as JBS of Brazil, the world’s largest meat producer, and large US-based businesses such as Tyson Foods, Cargill or Smithfield. Governments do not necessarily follow the FAO’s recommendations, but its views carry some weight, particularly among European policymakers.

The FAO said that without fresh measures - from taxes and fees to cuts in subsidies or a boost in the efficiency of the sector - “continued growth in livestock production will otherwise exert enormous pressures on ecosystems, biodiversity, land and forest resources and water quality, and will contribute to global warming”.

A tax on meat is something animal rights groups have been calling for for years, could this actually happen now? Could an increase in the price of meat encourage people to eat a plant-based diet or will they just eat cheaper, and more destructive, factory farmed meat?

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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.

Turns out the much quoted Livestock’s Long Shadow vastly underestimated the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the world’s production of meat and dairy. Forget 18%, a new study suggests it is actually over half of the world’s GHG emissions.

The Worldwatch Institute, an indepedent research body based in Washington, have just released the study Livestock and Climate Change in their November/ December edition of World Watch, which finds that animal agriculture accounts for at least 32.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.

So what went wrong with the Food and Agriculture’s report, Livestock’s Long Shadow? The report explains that some GHG emissions were “obvious but underestimated, some are simply overlooked, and some are emissions sources that are already counted but have been assigned to the wrong sectors”.

This new report challenges the FAO’s Livestock’s Long Shadow on several issues. Firstly, FAO completely excludes the carbon dioxide produced by animals breathing.

FAO only counts the emissions from changes in land use but not the vast amounts of potential carbon absorption by trees which has been lost by converting forests etc to grazing and growing animal feeds. If the land was not used for animal agriculture, it would regenerate and “could potentially mitigate as much as half (or even more) of all anthropogenic GHGs”. FAO does not take this in to account; considering 26 percent of land worldwide is used for grazing livestock and 33 percent of arable land for growing feed, clearly there is huge potential for carbon absorption if this land as converted back to forest and other natural habitats.

The FAO used an outdated figure for methane’s Global Warming Potential (which compares it’s potential for global warming to that of carbon dioxide), which means that it is grossly underestimated.

Livestock’s Long Shadow also ignores the fact that meat and dairy is accountable for more emission than plant based foods due to more; fluorocarbons, which are used to cool animal products; production, distribution and packaging (including of products such as leather, feathers, skin); cooking; disposal of liquid waste and disease, such as zoonotic diseases (such as swine flu) and other diseases cause by animal products, such as heart disease and cancer, which require carbon intensive medical treatment.

They conclude “By replacing livestock products with analogs [ie meat and dairy alternatives], consumers can take a single powerful action collectively to mitigate most GHGs worldwide”.

I have to say, I did suspect for a minute that there might be an animal group behind this report, perhaps there’s a hidden agenda? But no, the report was written by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang. Goodland worked at the World Bank for 23 years and was a lead environmental adviser (he’s since spoken out about how the World Bank is “damaging the planet and punishing the poor“), he also received an award from IUCN for outstanding contributions to environmental conservation. Anhang is a research officer and environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation.

You can read the report on the World Watch Institute website here.

Ugandan livestock farmers, concentrated along ‘the cattle corridor’ which runs southwest to northeast across Uganda, are already in conflict due to water scarcity and this will be exacerbated by increased demand and climate change. Oxfam’s recent report ‘Climate Change and Poverty in Uganda’ reveals that:-

“People in Uganda, whose contribution to global warming has been minuscule, are feeling the impacts of climate change first and worst. On the one hand there is more erratic rainfall in the March to June rainy season, bringing drought and reductions in crop yields and plant varieties; on the other hand, the rainfall, especially in the later rains towards the end of the year, is reported as coming in downpours that are more intense and destructive, bringing floods, landslides, and soil erosion”.

Livestock farmers are already being forced to move their animals great distances to find pasture and water, increasing the conflict between them as they encroach on to each others territories.

Renowned British environmentalist Norman Myers coined the phrase ‘the hamburger connection’ in the 1980s to describe how the rapid growth in beef exports in Central America to fast food chains is the US was driving deforestation. Since then we have seen massive destruction of the Amazon for cattle ranching and now the largest meat producer in the world, Tyson, has ambitious plans to enter countries such as Brazil, China and India to introduce and profit from the industrialistion of meat production in those countries.

There is no question that Uganda needs to overcome poverty, but developing a meat export market is not the answer. We have already seen the result of meat exportation in Brazil and other developing countries which has only resulted in further environmental destruction, conflict, poverty and hunger. Forty per cent of children’s deaths in Uganda are caused by malnutrition; they need the resources to feed their own people, not to fulfil the desire for meat in rich nations. If Norway really wanted to make a difference to people in Uganda, and didn’t actually have an alterior motive, that’s what they’d help them to do.

Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has an important message - the world must unite to reduce devastatating loss of the planet’s precious biodiversity.

He goes on to point out that “livestock production is itself a major culprit in climate change, responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than transport.  Biodiversity is directly threatened by this industry; about a fifth of terrestrial animal biomass goes to livestock - land that was once habitat for wildlife, and that can provide an important buffer against the impacts of climate change”.

The UN have long talked about the impacts of animal agriculture on the environment; their report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, is quoted in almost every article on the subject. When are they going to take  some serious action on this?

The Worldwatch Institute has released it´s Vital Signs 2007-2008 report, which highlights the key factors contributing to climate change.

“You see many trends in climate change, whether we are talking about grain production which is affected by droughts and flooding. Or meat production as livestock production makes up about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Erik Assadourian, director of the Vital Signs project.

The report shows that meat production hit a record of 276 million metric tonnes in 2006 (43 kilograms or 95 pounds per person).

The rising consumption of meat is also one of the main factors contributing to the rain forests of South America being cleared for soy bean plantations. Assadourian fears that 22 million hectares of forest and savannah could be cleared to grow soy beans in the next 20 years.

The report also points out that the consumption of fish has grown by three times since 1950, at a massive 156 million metric tonnes of seafood, even though many fish species are becoming threatened.

There´s just one report after another telling us the same fact – meat is destroying our planet.

You can buy the full report here

A new study hit the press today, again urging people to cut down their meat consumption to save the planet from climate change.

An international team of experts published their report in the medical journal The Lancet. They pointed out that agriculture contributes nearly 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, the vast majority specifically from livestock. Rainforests are cleared to provide grazing land and to grow the huge amount of crops needed to feed animals. Sheep and cows also produce large quantities of methane which is more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide. Then there is the transportation of animals and meat around the world.

Professor McMichael and his colleagues argue that “for the world’s higher-income populations, greenhouse-gas emissions from meat eating warrants the same scrutiny as do those from driving and flying”.

McMichael urges that Westerns cut down to 90 grams of meat per day by 2050, and shockingly points out that many people in the Western world eat roughly their own weight in meat every year, on average about 224 grams a day.

It is no wonder that heart disease and cancers are killing so many people in the Western world. Meat is destroying the planet and our bodies, not to mention the countless animals who are forced to live a life of pain and misery to satisfy our taste buds.

This is an important study, however, I do wish McMichael had the courage to say that we all need to stop eating meat completely, now, if we really want to make a difference.