Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of their 'marginal livelihoods' in
Livestock's Long Shadow
, has aroused some anger within
the organization. This reaction is almost certainly responsible for the tenor of FAO's 2009
State of Food and Agriculture Report (SOFA), the bulk of which is focussed on the need to
protect peasant livelihoods from rampant industrialization of the meat industry. The SOFA
report (at least the draft version) does much to redress the balance in favour of smallhold-
ers, though it still regards the march of industrialization and urbanization as 'unstoppable'.
And it repeats, without any re-examination, the livestock GHG figure of 18 per cent, which
in the rest of this chapter I shall argue is misleading and ideologically biased in favour of
intensive farming.
CO
2
from Deforestation
The FAO's figures are laid out in Table 6. Take first the 34 per cent of livestock emis-
sions - more than six per cent of all the world's greenhouse gases - attributed to defor-
estation. When areas of forest are cleared for any reason, very large quantities of carbon
stored in the timber are released into the atmosphere, mostly from burning. According to
the FAO, only in Latin America is land cleared on any scale for livestock (in Africa the
tsetse fly makes this difficult), and two thirds of this clearance is for beef and most of the
rest for soya bean production. Nobody denies that this is a grave problem. Nobody denies
that livestock are heavily implicated. But most other climate analysts do not allocate these
emissions to 'livestock' because to do so distorts the picture. For a number of reasons they
are normally allocated under a sector cumbersomely entitled Land Use, Land Use Change
and Forestry (LULUCF).
Table 6: Role of Livestock in Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide Emissions
