Livestock in the Food Debate - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 513

Water is an important input for livestock production. Water makes up over 98% of
all molecules in the body and is necessary for regulation of body temperature, growth,
reproduction, lactation, digestion, lubrication of joints, eyesight, and as a cleansing
agent. The problem is that farm animals “eat” almost 100 times more water than they
drink, to grow and produce. Livestock consume 32% of the global freshwater (Herero
2012). Most of the water is that used to produce animal feed, to grow grains and culti-
vated forages. To produce 1 Kg of grain, 96L of water is required, 2,000 liters, to grow
1 kg of rice, and up to 3000L to produce 1 kg of irrigated forage.5 Although a majority
of livestock feeding in developing countries depends upon crop residues and nonirri-
gated fodder, the preceding figures on water indicate significant dependence of livestock
production on a scarce natural resource—water—especially in industrialized livestock
rearing.
Lumping all livestock together in consideration of sustainability is a common but
unproductive strategy. Constructive approaches to decreasing the environmental
impact of intensive animal food production are obscured by a tendency of the pres-
ent debate to portray a largely undifferentiated picture with an industrial production
system bias. This perspective simplifies and misrepresents an extremely complex real-
ity (see Watson, this volume). That reality ranges from highly sophisticated industry, to
women milking and weaving the hairs of Yaks in the Himalaya, to landless women in
Bangladesh, who, through microcredit, buy a goat to escape poverty. These differences
matter. These are differences at the core of the mission of development co-operation,
aimed at reducing hunger and defending the rights of the weakest and the most
vulnerable.
Climate Change and the Livestock
Catch 22
At its very simplest, the carbon story might be summarized in three short words: use
less fuel. The matching nitrogen challenge is also clear: eat less meat. This is, in short,
the message launched in September 2008 to already concerned politicians by a Nobel
Prize-winning think tank, the UN´s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).
This message apparently makes a lot of common sense. One recent study suggested
that the average U.S. household's annual carbon food-print is 8.1 tons of equivalent CO2.
Half of this CO2, 4.4 tons of CO2 equivalence,6 comes from what and how we eat. Red
meat and dairy products are the most emission-intensive foods. Animal protein con-
stitutes already one-third of the total protein intake. Americans consume 3 times more
animal protein than needed; other rich countries have a similar profile. The increase of
meat consumption foreseen in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is a grow-
ing global threat to the climate. A sure-fire way of reducing CO2 equivalence of our diet