Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
For historical reasons the Dutch food industry is more highly specialized than any other,
except perhaps for those of its neighbours Belgium and Denmark. During the later Medi-
aeval period, the Flemish nations, obliged to feed a high population from a small land base,
but with financial resources from their trading activities at their disposal, became adept at
intensive agriculture, and remain so to this day. Nowadays, the Netherlands imports large
amounts of animal feeds, mainly soya and cassava, for its meat and dairy industries, which,
together with potatoes, sugar beet and other crops, support a booming food processing in-
dustry, both for home consumption and for export. The residues from this industry are con-
siderably more than would result from processing food purely for national consumption.
Nonhebel calculates that the residues from the average Dutch consumer's diet, if fed to
pigs, are sufficient to provide every inhabitant with 135 grams of pork per day, or 49 kilos
per year - far more than the average world per capita consumption of meat.
This sounds too good to be true, and it is. The Dutch consume a lot of soya oil, and 40
per cent of these food residues are soybean meal. It is doubtful whether the meal extracted
from soybeans can legitimately be regarded as a residue, since it is worth at least as much
as the oil itself. This is a complex question which is addressed separately in Chapter 6.
However, in other countries there are other reasons why a certain amount of meat or
dairy consumption has a low environmental impact, and hence comes within the AB sec-
tion of the curve. Wherever animals are grazed (but not overgrazed) on land that is unsuit-
able for arable production, they will be relieving pressure on the arable land, and helping to
retrieve otherwise inaccessible nutrients and bring them within the food chain. In less de-
veloped countries, the feeding of food wastes to pigs, poultry or fish has not been outlawed,
and these resources can be recycled to provide human nutrition. There are other situations
where the prime reason for keeping animals is not to provide food, but meat is a byproduct
or a co-product of an integrated system - for example when animals are used for traction,
or when fish or ducks are integrated into a complex cropping and fertility cycle.
In the FAO's most recent overview of the global livestock industry,
Livestock's Long
Shadow
, the authors refer to what they call a 'default land user strategy' for livestock. It is
an ungainly term, but the word 'default' - in its modern sense signifying what one auto-
matically falls back on when nothing else is specified - does sum up the role that animals
play in a food economy which is not expressly designed to produce meat or dairy. This is
what the FAO have to say:
Livestock are moving from a 'default land user strategy' (ie as the only way to
harness biomass from marginal lands, residues and interstitial areas) to an 'active land
user' strategy (ie competing with other sectors for the establishment of feedcrops, in-
tensive pasture and production units). This process leads to efficiency gains in the use
of resources.
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