Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
miscalculated the amount by a factor of perhaps 15 per cent either way, but the section AB
of Fig 1 will always be there and it will always provide a measure of free meat. How much
further up the hockey stick handle we can afford to go is a matter of debate.
Probably we can afford some level of grain production for livestock. The amount of grain
currently produced is more than enough to feed the world's population adequately if only
default meat and dairy products were consumed. There would be a substantial surplus of
grain - at least 150 million tonnes (the equivalent of an extra eight kilos of meat per person
per year if we assume a 3:1 conversion ratio) - and there are other reasons for wishing to
maintain a surplus to feed to animals, which I shall examine in Chapter 10.
By contrast, the premise of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, as expounded
in Livestock's Long Shadow, is that livestock production must move away from being a
'default land user strategy' to what they call an 'active land user strategy', but might more
helpfully be termed 'industrial farming'. Elsewhere they state:
In modern times, livestock production has developed from a resource-driven activ-
ity into one led mainly by demand. Traditional livestock was based on the availability
of local feed resources … Modern livestock production is essentially driven by de-
mand, drawing on additional feed resources as required.
That demand, in their view, has to be met. It is not true to say that the FAO never men-
tion the possibility of reducing or managing demand for meat or dairy products. In the
SOFA report you can find the following sentence tucked away at the end of the section on
climate change:
In developed countries, reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products
could lower emissions without harming human health.
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That's it. There is no further discussion, nor rebuttal, of a proposal which solves 90 per
cent of the problems that their report agonizes over, and which many thousands of environ-
mental commentators advocate. Somewhere in
Livestock's Long Shadow
there is a similar
statement, but it is so deeply buried and so inconsequential that I can no longer find it.
The view of the FAO economists is that a rural population content to consume what their
local environment provides is already outnumbered and soon to be superseded by an urb-
an proletariat who expect to buy anything they want in a supermarket, or aspire to be rich
enough to do so. The FAO never seriously suggests that it is anything other than the duty
of capitalism to provide as sumptuous a spread as it can, and anticipate that between 1999
and 2050, global meat production and milk production will double.
Having accepted this premise, the FAO are correct in drawing the following conclusions:
