How widely accepted is the link between meat consumption and climate change?

 Logic dictates that if the link between meat consumption and climate change were widely accepted, industrial meat production would decrease, governments would push policies towards achieving such a goal, and per capita meat consumption rates would decline. But simple, straightforward logic isn't the only attribute to guide our actions, is it? Instead, notwithstanding the link between global meat production and climate change, the data show that meat production and consumption are on the rise globally as industrialization globalizes, industrial agriculture replaces traditional small-scale farming and hundreds of millions of humans are pulled out of poverty. Why does affluence tend to go hand in hand with meat consumption? Meat eating's a status symbol for the newly affluent the world over. A look at some of the obscene, shocking numbers suffices to convince we're far from global peak industrial meat production and consumption (see figures below from 1, 2, 3, 4).

Industrial meat production's much more inefficient in energy conversion and much more unsustainable in terms of deforestation and desertification, i.e., much more costly for Mother Earth.

• For e.g., massive forest cover's already been depleted in Brazil to make way for croplands needed to sustain food animal feed crops (soybean, corn).
• Land taken over for monoculture crop production for animal feed tends to become degraded faster.
• Industrial food animal production (IFAP) also requires massive freshwater use, this when increasing millions of humans the world over lack access to potable (safe drinking) water.
• Animal poop and pee from IFAPs heavily pollute nearby lands and waterways, working their way through the ecosystem.
• Also working their way through the ecosystem are the massive doses of antibiotics these hapless masses of animals are fed to accelerate their weight gain so they're ready for market that much sooner.
• Not to mention the sheer immeasurable pain and suffering of billions of food animals housed in soul-destroying inhumane conditions.

Rounding off such a perfectly dreadful litany of intractable problems associated with IFAP is its unmistakable contribution to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

So why, in the face of all the most compelling data advising otherwise, are meat production and consumption increasing globally?

• For one, IFAP's rise accompanies our increasing dissociation with the source of our food (2). It's not just food animal raising that's industrialized. So has their slaughter. The Brazilian company JBS is the world leader in animal slaughter. Its worldwide facilities can slaughter 85000 cattle, 70000 pigs and 12 million birds...every day. Following close on its heels is the US firm Tyson which can slaughter 170000 cattle, 350000 pigs and 42 million chickens...every week (2). And it isn't by accident that industrialized country IFAPs and abattoirs (slaughterhouses) are located far from cities in rural backwoods nor that they employ low-wage workers working in terrible conditions, i.e., captive labor market. Most industrial country consumers and increasingly, urban consumers in industrializing countries buy prettily packaged pre-cut slabs of meat in urban supermarkets, The Stepford Wives world far removed from the slaughterhouses with their rivers of blood, squeals, bulging eyes and sheer soul-chilling terror.
• For another, why change current habits when there's no immediate penalty for the status quo and no incentive for change? After all, governments haven't shown much inclination to curb meat consumption nor taken a stance against IFAPs and CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) nor have citizenry successfully prevailed upon them to do so.
• Lastly, scientifically exploring the link between diet and climate change is of fairly recent vintage. It started in the late 1990s with Goodland saying 'diet matters' in the conversation about climate change (5). Since then many researchers have used life analysis and input-output models to estimate energy consumptions and GHG emissions of different foodstuffs (6, 7). Global meat production and climate change were first definitively linked in 2006 in a groundbreaking, massive (400 pages) study by Henning Steinfeld et al at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This was the first study that clearly showed 'the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems' (8). They estimated global meat production contributes to 15 to 24% of total annual GHG emissions (5 to 7 X 109 tonnes per year).  Studies since show that meat and dairy production in particular are associated with disproportionately high GHG emissions (9, 10).

Since agriculture and related industrial activity are a massive part of the global economy, and directly and indirectly employ at least 1/7th of the global human population, there's been immediate and sustained pushback against the argument linking IFAP to GHG emission (see reference 8's wikipedia page for sources and their rationale). However, the conflict of interest inherent in the stance of such stakeholders renders their arguments weak and unconvincing.

Meantime, as the figures above show, meat production in places like China and Brazil has only increased even more steeply in the last few years. This means global meat production's contribution to GHG is only increasing, not decreasing and it will continue to do so unless and until governments intervene with specific policy changes. They could stop or curtail massive subsidies to agriculture for example so that we each pay the real price for our food. Pigs are likely to fly sooner. Yet if nothing changes, inevitable major environmental cataclysms from anthropogenic global warming (AGW) will likely hijack the agenda willy-nilly or IFAP-sourced pandemics will help wipe out a substantial chunk of global human population (11). Our pathetic history of collective problem solving shows these latter possibilities are far more likely than timely and wise government intervention, and when such eventualities inevitably come to pass, those humans unlucky enough to survive such apocalyptic catastrophes will perforce need to change their obscenely profligate abuse of Earth and domesticated animals. In fact, such survivors would likely no longer be able to dictate terms and the Earth will be all the more better off for it.

Bibliography

1. Growing greenhouse gas emissions due to meat production. UN Environment Programme (UNEP), 2012. http://www.unep.org/pdf/unep-gea...

2. Meat Atlas: Facts and Figures about the animals we eat. Heinrich Boll Stiftung, 2014. https://www.bund.net/fileadmin/b....

3. FAOSTAT

4. Thornton, Philip K. "Livestock production: recent trends, future prospects.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 365.1554 (2010): 2853-2867. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishi...

5. Goodland, Robert. "Environmental sustainability in agriculture: diet matters." Ecological Economics 23.3 (1997): 189-200. http://www.is.cnpm.embrapa.br/bi...

6. Coley, David A., Emma Goodliffe, and Jennie Macdiarmid. "The embodied energy of food: the role of diet." Energy policy 26.6 (1998): 455-460.

7. Phetteplace, Hope W., Donald E. Johnson, and Andrew F. Seidl. "Greenhouse gas emissions from simulated beef and dairy livestock systems in the United States." Nutrient cycling in agroecosystems 60.1-3 (2001): 99-102. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

8. Steinfeld, H., Gerber, P., Wassenaar, T., Castel, V., Rosales, M. and de Haan, C. (2006). Livestock’s long shadow: Environmental issues and options. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy. Livestock's Long Shadow

9. Eshel, Gidon, and Pamela A. Martin. "Diet, energy, and global warming." Earth interactions 10.9 (2006): 1-17. http://www.environmentalcalculat...

10. Stehfest, Elke, et al. "Climate benefits of changing diet." Climatic change 95.1-2 (2009): 83-102. http://dels.nationalacademies.or...

11. Leibler, Jessica H., et al. "Industrial food animal production and global health risks: exploring the ecosystems and economics of avian influenza." Ecohealth 6.1 (2009): 58-70. http://are.berkeley.edu/~dwrh/CE...

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