Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
are heading for is not that we should all eat less meat, still less that North Americans should
stop stuffing cows and pigs with grain that hungry people could eat. On the contrary, they
anticipate that meat consumption will more than double, from 229 million tonnes in 2001,
to 465 million tonnes in 2050. The conclusion of the report is that:
It is hard to see an alternative to intensification of livestock production … The
principle means of limiting livestock's impact on the environment must be to reduce
land requirements for livestock. This involves the intensification of the most product-
ive arable and grassland used to produce feed or pasture.
In other words reduce grazing and move towards factory farming. This will come as
no surprise to long term observers of the FAO or of Henning Steinfeld. Back in the early
1990s,
The Ecologist
waged a fierce campaign against the FAO claiming that its pro-
gramme was targeting vulnerable peasants, and blaming them for environmental damage
which was rooted in the pressures upon their livelihoods coming from industrial farmers.
In another 1998 FAO document, Steinfeld wrote:
We cannot afford the common nostalgic desire to maintain or revive mixed farm-
ing systems with closed nutrient and energy cycles … To avoid overuse of immediate
natural resources, mixed farmers and pastoral people alike need to substitute them
with external inputs … Grain-fed livestock should be promoted 'even though, prima
facie, there may be competition between food and feed uses of some commodities …
The trend of further intensification and specialization of demand-driven production is
inescapable. Attempts to change the direction are doomed to failure.
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It is the same argument as that put forward by the Global Opponents of Organic Farming,
whom we met in Chapter 8: 'spare, don't share'. Maximize production and human impact
on some land so as to relieve pressure elsewhere. Its is an approach that inevitably tends
to favour urbanized, grain-fed pigs and poultry over wide-ranging fibre-eating cows and
goats.
Once you appreciate that this is where Steinfeld is coming from it is easier to understand
where he is going. Throughout much of
Livestock's Long Shadow
, the assumptions made,
the criteria chosen and the matters left out are those that one would make and choose and
leave out if one wanted to show that intensive livestock farming was less harmful to the
climate than extensive livestock farming, or as the authors themselves put it, 'by far the
largest share of emissions come from more extensive systems where poor livestock holders
often extract marginal livelihoods from dwindling resources'.
There are many people within the FAO who spend their working lives trying to assist
and defend peasant livestock farmers, so it is not surprising to hear that the stigmatization
