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.

A report produced by a research team from Austria, Brazil and the United States (published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) has suggested that wealthier nations could reduce global carbon emissions by between 2 and 10 percent by paying landowners in developing nations not to clear forested land for agriculture.

Around a fifth of all human-related carbon emissions in the world are caused by the deforestation of tropical forests to produce land to raise livestock and grow crops (much of which is imported to Europe to feed animals raised for meat).

This idea of ‘avoided deforestation’, now known as ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation’ (REDD), is not new but has failed to be widely accepted. The Coalition for Rainforest Nations, including countries such as Papua New Guinea, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Chile, Congo, and Costa Rica, is pushing for an agreement that they will be compensated for protecting their forests in recognition of the fact that this is often at the expense of their economic development. Sounds like a good idea until you realise that the compensation is in the form of carbon credits, which can be traded to offset carbon emissions produced elsewhere. There are also many other problems surrounding this issue, including the rights of indigenous peoples.

As corporate-driven and illegal logging projects surge ahead in their quest for money, we desperately need to find a way halt deforestation. Whilst governments and NGOs battle it out, there aways seem to be a critical missing link. Deforestation is driven by the over-consumption of the North; this is what creates the demand and power the massive multi-national corporations need to continue with their destruction. They will always find a way. The only sure way to stop them is to look at our own consumption habits and make the change that’s needed.

The biggest driver of deforestation in many areas is livestock grazing and growing soy and other crops to feed animals in the North. With meat consumption expected to double by 2050, we have to accept that the best action we can take to protect our forests is to stop eating meat.