Expansion of markets for European poultry and milk powder has long been a key facet of the EU's trade liberalisation agendas, as African farmers and livestock keepers know. They have been mobilising to stop the dumping of highly subsidised chicken and excess dairy from Europe since years. These struggles are now more and more connected to climate change. Industrial poultry, after all, are an important source of greenhouse gas emissions. Broilers, which are raised for their meat, produce seven times more GHG emissions than backyard birds. And layers, which are raised for their eggs, produce four times more. 15
Chicken consumption is rising in many countries because it is a low-cost meat, and therefore global poultry trade is expected to increase. All of this trade comes from industrial poultry farms, which are higher emitting than backyard or small-scale operations. Brazilian and EU poultry farms are relatively highest on the climate-unfriendliness scale, mostly attributed to their reliance on soybeans. 16 Even in China, where exports are just a small fraction of the country's production, trade deals are leading to increased imports of feed materials which serve the factory farms that are built with increased levels of foreign investment.
Beyond poultry, experts now say that over the next ten years, increased global meat consumption will raise overall greenhouse gas emissions regardless of improved feed-to-meat conversion ratios in industrial production systems. 17
3. Boosting global supermarkets and highly processed foods
The biggest names in food retail are aiming for growth in Asia, as well as Africa and Latin America, through several of today's new trade agreements. The expansion of global supermarkets brings with it the expansion of processed food production, trade and consumption. For example, under NAFTA, processed food consumption has skyrocketed in Mexico, bringing with it serious public health problems, and the country's retail sector has been taken over by large global chains. 18
Processed foods -- produced by Mondelez, Nestle, Pepsico, Danone, Unilever and the like -- are important greenhouse gas emitters, not only because of all the energy used in packaging, processing and transporting the foods, but also because of the emissions generated on the farm. Processed foods are constructed out of the cheapest raw materials that companies can source from around the globe. One package of standard supermarket food can contain powdered milk from New Zealand, maize from the US, sugar from Brazil, soybeans from Argentina and palm oil from Indonesia -- all foods that are high on the emissions scale.
One recent study of a box of breakfast cereal found that eating a 100 gramme serving generates the equivalent of 264 grammes of CO2. Add milk to the cereal and the emissions go up by two to four times.
One recent study of a box of Kellogg's breakfast cereal found that eating a 100 gramme serving generates the equivalent of 264 grammes of CO2. Add milk to the cereal and the emissions go up by two to four times. The ingredients accounted for about half the total emissions form the cereal, while manufacturing, packaging and transport contributed the rest. The researches identified over 20 countries from which the ingredients were sourced, including maize from Argentina, milk powder from the EU, rice from Egypt and Thailand, wheat from Spain and sugar from the US. 19
The growth of supermarkets and processed foods also means increased deforestation, and other changes in land and water use, to produce more sugar, maize, soybeans and palm oil -- four products that form the backbone of the processed food sector. For example, in Nigeria, Wilmar, the largest palm oil trading company in the world, plans to expand its oil palm plantations in Cross River State and this, groups on the ground say, will inevitably mean new deforestation. Through its trade agreements with the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), India has become a major market for Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil, displacing coconut, mustard, groundnut, sesame and other traditional Indian vegetable oils, which were far less damaging to the climate. The same goes for China, the second largest market for ASEAN palm oil after India.
The just-concluded TPP may bring an important upswing in palm oil production, trade and use. "I expect there to be quite a stampede of foreign investment in Southeast Asia when the final text of the agreement is published," Deborah Elms, executive director of the Asian Trade Centre, told The Wall Street Journal. 20 Specifically, Malaysia's palm oil sector is supposed attract a lot of this stampede, as investors jump in to lock down a new cheap source of oil for the US fast food industry. 21
4. Climate cheating: the outsourcing of emissions
One of the effects of trade deals is that manufacturing is being outsourced to low wage countries with few environmental restrictions. The countries where these products are consumed thus appear to have reduced emissions when really those emissions have simply been transferred to the countries where the goods are now produced. As we see in the case of the US and China, neither country then wants to take responsibility. The same happens with foods.
Trade agreements favour food production in countries with low cost and/or heavily subsidised production, with high emissions levels. These countries have powerful industrial agriculture lobbies (US, Brazil, New Zealand, Europe) and are often heavily reliant on agriculture exports for their foreign revenues (US, Brazil, New Zealand, Ireland, Indonesia, New Zealand, Vietnam). It is highly unlikely that these countries will implement any measures to reduce emissions that might impinge on the competitiveness of their agricultural commodities. Already we see these countries moving with their companies to head off international efforts to make significant emissions cuts to agriculture, for instance with the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture.
The emissions imported with the foods are not likely to be accounted for by the importing country either. Even if an importing government were to try, measures to reduce imports of certain high greenhouse gas emitting commodities could be challenged as unfair trade restrictions under the new deals.
5. More biofuels
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