GLOBAL WARMING: COWS OR CARS? - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 199

ducing states in Brazil. Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef
prices … . We're seeing that these predictions - first made last summer by the Woods
Hole Research Centre's Daniel Nepstad and colleagues - are being borne out. The
evidence of a corn connection to the Amazon is circumstantial, but it's about as close
as you ever get to a smoking gun. 25
There is also evidence that the spread of sugarcane plantations in Brazil, again mostly to
supply biofuels, has been pushing small farmers and beef ranchers towards the Amazon. 26
Much of the 2008 increase in deforestation, it seems, was not driven by the need to feed
beef, but the need to fuel motor cars.
The FAO in Livestock's Long Shadow claim that 65 per cent of deforestation is for beef
pasture and 27 per cent for soya. But only half of the area cleared for soya is attributed to
livestock, because nearly half the value of the soya is in the oil, which doesn't go to anim-
als. If you take the view (as Henning Steinfeld did in the 1990s) that cattle are just the foot
soldiers of deforestation and that now demand for soya and other crops is the main driving
force, then the amount of deforestation attributable to livestock would go down accord-
ingly. At the current reduced rate of deforestation, livestock would be responsible for little
more than one per cent of the world's CO 2 emissions, rather than the six per cent claimed
by the FAO.
If you conclude that soya cultivation is the main culprit, it also follows that many more
of the emissions would be attributable to intensive agriculture, and many less to extensive
cattle farmers, a matter I will return to later. Blame cattle and you are blaming a handful
of cowboys and the mainly Brazilian consumers who buy the beef; blame soya and you are
blaming global agribusiness - not least British agribusiness, which imports 90 per cent of
its soya from Brazil and Argentina. 27 This decision, how to partition the responsibility for
deforestation between the driving force and the advance guard, has a direct bearing on one
third of all the carbon emissions that the FAO attribute to livestock. Yet it is as much an
ideological decision as it is a scientific one, and as such it provides an unreliable basis for
attaching a percentage of the blame.
(iv) Rainforest cattle are not typical
If, however, you agree with the FAO's view that however, you agree with the FAO's
view that two thirds of rainforest clearance is due to cattle, then there is a fourth reason to
question their calculation. The rainforest cattle which they hold responsible for a quarter
of all livestock GHG emissions represent a very small proportion of the world's livestock:
perhaps five per cent of the world's cattle, and about 1.5 per cent of the world's animal
products. 28 The authors of Livestock's Long Shadow, when it was published, were alone
in choosing to take the massive emissions from this tiny rogue sector, which they acknow-