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?

Read the full article.
Download the UN report.

The excellent Meat-Free Monday e-newsletter from Animal Aid reported today on a new report regarding world hunger and food production.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), nearly 30 percent of the world’s population suffer from some form of malnutrition. And this week, a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, states that 25 million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to a decline in agricultural productivity and food shortages.

The lead author of the IFPRI report stated that ‘we are going to have 50 per cent more people on the surface of the Earth by 2050 and meeting food demands is going to be a huge challenge - even without climate change’. However, according to the FAO, ‘the world already produces enough food to feed every child, woman and man and could feed 12 billion people, or double the current world population’. The main problem is not the amount of food available, but the ways in which the world’s grain harvest is being used and distributed - farmed animals are fed no less than half of the world’s harvest.

Instead of adding to the amount of food available, meat simply creates even more mouths to feed; those of farmed animals. And the return is extremely poor. It takes roughly eight kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef and two kilos are required for one kilo of chicken. It would make far more sense to grow food that humans can eat directly - grains, pulses, legumes, nuts, vegetables and fruits. As resources become ever more scarce, experts now agree that the human population must rely more upon a plant-based diet. Patrick Wall, chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, questions whether it is ‘morally or ethically correct’ to be feeding grain to animals while people starve. We can all take steps to ease the hunger of children and others around the world by reducing the amount of animal products we eat, starting with Meat-Free Monday, or better yet, going completely meat-free.

To sign up to the Meat-Free Monday newsletter, which includes news updates and recipes, and find out more about this campaign visit the Animal Aid website.

This week Kofi Annan, President of the Global Humanitarian Forum and former UN secretary general, warned the world of the severe consequences of not taking strong enough action against climate change; which includes millions more people falling in to poverty, loosing their homes and their lives.

The report, titled Human Impact Report: Climate Change – The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis gives some frightening statistics…

Climate change today accounts for over 300,000 deaths throughout the world each year (equivalent of an Indian Ocean Tsunami every single year)
By 2030, 500,000 will die from climate change per year.

Climate change today seriously impacts on the lives of 325 million people.
By 2030, 660 million people will be seriously impacted by climate change, making it the biggest emerging humanitarian challenge in the world, impacting on the lives of 10% of the world’s population.

Economic losses due to climate change already today amount to over $125 billion per year (this is more than the total amount of international aid to developing nations each year).
By 2030, the economic losses due to climate change will be $340 billion annually.

To avert this severe threat to humankind, we must act now. While we all wait for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen and hope that the lobbying efforts of hundreds of thousands of people around the world will ensure the right decisions are made, let’s not forget that we can all take action ourselves regardless of what they decide. Animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions; by making the right lifestyle choices we can make a difference.

The recent United Nations’ Global Environment Outlook-4 report has revealed that water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks are all in “inexorable decline” as each individual person’s environmental footprint has now grown to an average of 22 hectares of the planet - 7 hectares per person more than the planet can provide. We have now reached a point where the amount of resources required by human beings exceeds what our ailing planet can provide.

There is no question that we must change how we live our lives. We must make the most efficient use of our planet - our survival depends on it. We know that meat uses huge amounts of water and land and that it is the most inefficient food source. For example, cows need to eat 7g of grain to produce just 1g of meat. For the future of the planet, we must stop eating meat.

Species are also becoming extinct 100 times faster than in the past (as shown by fossil studies). The Amazon rain forest is disappearing at a frightening rate - 70% of land which was once forest, is now used for grazing cattle and a large proportion of the rest is used to grow crops for animal feed. Meat is responsible for vast areas of the biodiversity rich Amazon being destroyed and for the extinctions that have occured as a result.

Western consumers must rethink how they are living their lives and they must do so now. The planet cannot wait any longer.