Trade Deals Boosting Climate Change: The Food Factor

Box 2: The elephant -- er, lamb? -- in the room

The meat industry is perhaps the biggest single cause of climate change. The data vary, are debated and may be distorted. For example, there is a tendency in some corners to present super industrialised cattle operations in the US or Western Europe as being more "climate friendly" than sustainable grazing systems in India or Niger. That is because agencies like FAO tend to use a narrow lens of "efficiency" to make the comparison and they don't factor in the positive climate contributions from sustainable grazing systems in Asia or Africa. Even the IPCC, which produces much of "the science" that people rely on to judge and act on climate change, gets it wrong sometimes. Still, there is no reason to doubt that raising or capturing animals for food is one of the biggest causes of climate change.

Some key facts worth chewing on:

• According to one often cited but highly criticised study by FAO, put out in 2006, livestock are responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers from the World Bank, writing for the Worldwatch Institute in 2009, put it at 51%. In 2013, FAO reduced their figure to 15%. Either way, it's big -- more than all forms of transportation (air, car, ship) combined.
• Two-thirds (65%) of livestock emissions comes from beef (35%) and dairy (30%) production alone, FAO reported in 2013. 26 World dairy production is responsible for 4% of all global GHG emissions.
• One quarter of the earth's land mass is used for grazing and nearly half of all crops that we produce (40%) -- which produce GHGs as well -- is fed to livestock.
• Livestock contribute to climate change not so much in terms of carbon emissions but in terms of methane (from ruminant digestion systems = 47% of their emissions) and nitrous oxide (from the fertiliser used to produce their feed + animal waste = 24% of livestock emissions). Methane and nitrous oxide are far more dangerous for our climate than carbon dioxide. In fact, recent data from the University of Minnesota, Yale and USDA suggests that the IPCC have been underestimating N2O emissions from industrial crop production -- much of this to produce animal feed -- by 40%.

Take into account the general thinking that the world's meat and dairy consumption are projected to double by 2050, and one can see this is a serious and growing problem.

The good news is that we can do something about this, and relatively quickly. Cutting back on meat and dairy production, consumption and trade would be an effective and realistic way to reduce climate chaos. Compared to carbon, methane is a lot easier and a lot faster to "clean up" from the atmosphere. As to nitrous oxide, a contraction and restructuring of the meat industry towards small scale and local systems could do away with a lot of the fertiliser that is currently being used to produce feed.

We don't have to all go vegan, but if we want to address climate change we have to take some very serious action towards the meat industry on a systemic and international scale. It's not enough to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels.

(It's important to note that FAO data on GHG emissions from livestock is produced with input from people from the meat and dairy industry: the International Poultry Council, International Feed Industry Federation, International Meat Secretariat, International Egg Commission and.... Danone.)