LIVESTOCK producers across the developed world are under pressure as concerns about food security and climate change create a debate in which the vegetarian lobby has adopted the high moral ground.
Advocates of vegetarianism say that a plant-based diet requires less land and less water, produces less greenhouse gas emissions, and is healthier than a diet incorporating meat.
But how useful is the “world must turn vegetarian” argument, really?
Support for the individual arguments in favour of vegetarianism can be found in a number of studies, but the full picture is more complicated.
In Australia, a continent where only 7pc of the land mass is suitable for cropping and where irrigation capacity is limited (and may be in permanent decline), switching to a purely plant-based diet would radically change the amount of food the nation produces.
In 2008, the nation’s livestock industries produced 2.87 million tonnes of beef and sheepmeat—four per cent of the world’s beef and eight per cent of its sheepmeat.
Milk production is close to a billion litres, nearly half of it exported.
Some of that livestock production came at the expense of grain production, or through feeding grain that might have fed people.
But producing animal protein can also create food from grain that would otherwise be unsuitable for human consumption.
The fact is, said MLA’s Dr Beverley Henry, “that we don’t fully understand the impacts of substituting animal protein for vegetable protein”.
“We do know that meat provides nutrients that are valuable for human health. Substituting meat with vegetable protein would require a lot more intake and therefore require that currently uncropped land was converted to cropping to fit that need.”
“But most of our meat production occurs on land that isn’t arable. And if Australia stopped eating red meat and the animals disappeared from the landscape, so too would the management that pastoralists provide.”
“The landscape wouldn’t just go back to pre-European settlement conditions: it would be overrun with weeds and feral animals, and be prone to hot wildfires.”
Such possibilities align with the belief of British researcher Dr Tara Garnett that any consideration of food production and its effect on climate must take into account the “second order impacts” of any production system, and “opportunity cost”—like whether plant-based substitutes for meat are actually a more efficient way of producing food.
Second order impacts cut both ways.
Dr Garnett points out that the United States feedlot-based beef industry uses soybean from Brazil, grown on land deforested so it could be cropped, with a resulting release of greenhouse gas emissions not accounted for in the US beef emissions life cycle inventory.
At the same time, removing animals from land only suitable for grazing takes away the land’s economic value and the ability to sequester carbon through managed pastures.
Dr Garnett, who manages the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN), said any conversation around food production inevitably becomes a tug-of-war between economics, politics and ethics.
“We have a lot of political pressure to tackle climate change, but also enormous pressure to give people what they want—which is meat,” she said.
That human desire for meat makes it certain the the vegetarian lobby will always remain a voice in the wilderness; but environmental and other concerns make it equally certain that meat production will be under sustained pressure.
For instance, Australian National University epidemiologist Professor Tony McMichael contributed to a paper in the prestigous medical journal, The Lancet, proposing that the world commit to reducing the global average daily intake of meat, especially red meat from ruminants.
“This would be part of the evolving portfolio strategy—across various sectors of commerce, energy use and human behaviour—to mitigate climate change,” Prof. McMichael wrote in an article for a Food Ethics Council publication “Meat: The Challenge”.
“To avoid an increasing contribution to global warming from the livestock sector, we recommend a global average target figure of 90 grams of meat per day—with not more than 50 grams from ruminant animals. “
Corey Watts of The Climate Institute suggests that the future might involve fewer animals, but with a greater individual value born of strong environmental credentials.
“There’s a good case for the livestock industries really getting on top of environmental issues, because that’s where they are going to be judged in the future,” Mr Watts said.
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