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ENVIRONMENTALISTS don’t like meat. It is not just—or even mainly—that some will not eat meat on moral grounds. Rather, greens say, meat has a big environmental hoofprint. It takes much more grain, land and water to fatten an animal to produce a pound of meat than it does to grow the same number of calories in the form of grain that is eaten directly (as bread, say). Animals also belch and fart forth remarkable quantities of greenhouse gases. The logical conclusion was drawn by Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said “eat less meat; you’ll be healthier and so will the planet.”
New research in the current (special) edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that raising livestock does indeed chew up a disproportionately large share of the world’s basic resources. But it also suggests that reforming the livestock business, rather than rejecting it, is the way to go.
Livestock matters because it is the biggest land user in the world. More land is given over to grazing animals than for any other single purpose. About a third of the world’s crops are fed to animals, and they use a third of all available fresh water. Something like 1.3 billion people depend in some way on raising animals; animals provide a third of the protein in peoples’ diets and the business accounts for a third of global agricultural GDP. But meat is an inefficient source of calories. It accounts for 17% of global calorific intake, but uses twice that amount of land, water and feed.
Livestock also damages the environment. It accounts for between 8% and 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions, depending on how you account for changes in land use (when the Amazon is cut down for pasture, carbon emissions rise). Roughly a fifth of all the world’s pasture has been degraded by overgrazing. Livestock uses water inefficiently: you need about 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef but only 1,250 litres for a kilo of maize or wheat. And animals form a significant reservoir of diseases that affect humans; avian flu, the best known example, is far from an isolated case: 60% of human diseases are shared with animals and three quarters of new infectious diseases of people were first found in animals.
But a reduction in the size of the business isn’t going to happen soon, if ever. Urbanisation and rising incomes mean that more of the world is converging on European and American levels of meat consumption, which is roughly 100kg a year (80kg in Britain, 120kg in America). At the moment, most of Africa and South Asia eats less than 20kg of meat a year. Even if parts of India remain vegetarian, shifting patterns of demand imply worldwide meat consumption will double by 2050.
So the question is, what sort of livestock farming can satisfy the growing appetites, while using land, water and food crops more rationally? Environmentalists have an answer for that: small-scale, traditional pastoralism, of the sort practised for thousands of years. Such farming is, says Worldwatch Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, “essential to combat the destructive trend of factory farms.” The research in PNAS suggests this is back to front. Intensive livestock farming is more efficient and environmentally friendlier. It is essential to combat the destructive trend of traditional pastoralism.
The research by Mario Herrero of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and colleagues starts by establishing a new data set on biomass use, meat production, feed efficiency, and other measures of livestock farming. It breaks this down by region, animal species, products (meat, milk, eggs and so on). This is vital because, even though the livestock sector is big, comprehensive, disaggregated data on it has been patchy.
The results confirm that efficiency in livestock varies hugely. Chickens and pigs convert grain into meat at rates of two or three to one (ie, it takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken). The ratio for lamb is between four and over six to one and that for beef starts at five to one and goes as high as 20 to one. This has long been known. What is new are the amounts of greenhouse gases associated with the production of a kilo of protein by different animals. These vary even more widely: 3.7kg for chicken; 24kg for pork; and up to 1,000kg for cattle. The lower, more efficient ratios for chicken and pigs come about because they are kept in hated factory farms. Factory farming is good for the planet, if not for the animals.
The new research shows that there is an enormous spread of efficiency throughout livestock farming, not just between different animals. Milk is far more efficient than meat: it takes five times as much feed to produce protein in the form of meat than in milk.
A cow in America or Europe will need to eat somewhere between 75kg and 300kg of hay and other dry matter for each kilo of protein. In most of Africa, she will need 500kg or more. On the dry rangelands of east Africa—in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia—the figure is up to 2,000kg, because the land is so poor. In these places, switching from traditional pastoralism to feeding cattle with grain would dramatically improve efficiency. It would also reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Cattle on dry rangelands produce 100 times as much greenhouse gases as cattle in America or Europe for the same amount of protein. Cattle account for 77% of the greenhouse gases produced by livestock for 59m tonnes of beef each year. Pork and poultry produce 10% of the greenhouse gases, but 215m tonnes of meat.
Several lessons emerge from the new research. The advantages of white meat (chicken and pork) are even greater than was thought. Milk is more efficient as a source of protein than meat. And there are big opportunities for efficiencies in South Asia, South-East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where 45-80% of pig and chicken farms are run by smallholders (compared with America and Europe, where 98% are run at industrial scale). There are risks, too, because industrial-scale livestock farming harbours some of the diseases that humans share with animals. But efficiencies in livestock farming imply better use of scarce basic resources such as land and water—which is environmentally essential.
Our correspondents consider matters relating to demography and development, including food production and public health
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Readers' comments
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The 'livestock v grain' argument is old and shortsighted. Livestock produce much more than just meat, including things such as leather, tallow etc. They graze pastures that cannot be used for anything else, they are used to manage wild areas that are fire prone to reduce the risk and severity of fires. They eat grain that is not fit for human consumption.
The assertion that grain production is less damaging to the environment or has a smaller carbon footprint usually ignores a range of factors in the chain of production, not least nitrogen fertiliser, use of diesel and various other inputs. Soil is usually more damaged under a cropping regime than under even a degraded pasture.
Another thing we should all remember is that no crop grows without the death of animals. The fact that a crop can be grown usually involves excluding or killing of a range of animals and insects in order to protect that crop. It isn't simply a matter of either having animals or not.
If meat is so much more resource-intensive to produce, why is it so cheap? Is meat production somehow being subsidized over say, soybean production?
" Milk is far more efficient than meat: it takes five times as much feed to produce protein as milk than as meat."
I think the editor should re-read this sentence, then correct it.
One of the main reasons to save the planet at all is so that we can continue to eat meat, glorious meat.
So if we can cut the global population by 80% we can can all have a completely carnivorous diet. This would be much more preferable than having to eat lentil burgers.
There's a tradeoff between environmental meat production and ethical meat production. A lot of greens don't make this insight. Kudos.
Now for the errors. Human being-ness is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for personhood. Corporations are people too my friend, as the line goes; post-1990 Terri Schiavo was mostly a commemorative piece to the pre-1990 person. I regard my border collie with more love than most (and, frankly, as being more intelligent than quite a bit) of the human race. As far as why border collies in general get more love than rats, cockroaches, or amoebas, I'll suggest it is on three grounds: history of domestication, a higher degree of cognition, and small threat to humans. Lastly, there need not be a tradeoff between human and animal concerns. As you are aware, going vegetarian frees up water, land, and food to make life better for humans.
"The question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?"
-Jeremy Bentham
As far as the feed conversion efficiency of various meats goes: of course, pigs and poultry produce more meat for less feed, but they cannot be fed the same things that cattle, sheep and goats eat. This in part means we need to be aware that again, these animals are in largely different situations.
These are just some of the things that are overlooked in this kind of debate. There is much more to this, particularly from an environmental perspective.
Nightmare to get through spam filter!!!
"Milk is far more efficient than meat: it takes five times as much feed to produce protein as milk than as meat."
Shouldn't it read "as meat than as milk."
The same mistake is repeated later in the article.
Jeez. Go veg already.
cont....
In Southern Australia, most farming operations are mixed; including both livestock and grain production. This is because livestock are used to spread price and production risk as they can usually survive tougher periods better than a crop can. They can also be moved, fed and sold at different times. The combination of livestock and crops should be seen as risk mitigation.
Yes, why do tomatoes and avocados cost more than say, chicken?
'Soylent Green' then to feed the planet?
On the other hand, you can raise cattle or sheep by having them graze on grass on hillsides which cannot be farmed for grain. So it's not like you are necessarily cutting grain production to raise them. And that's before you figure that, in many areas of the American west, failure to graze animals on those hillsides means lots more dry grass fueling wildfires through the dry months. Wildfires which produce far more green house gases than the animals would.
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Perhaps the author has different acquaintances among the greens. But among the ones I know, the push to reduce/eliminate meat animals always started with vegetarianism. The green arguments they offer are rationalizations for a position already in place.
Maybe just a little meat. All those Chinese can't be wrong. After all, some of us find it easier to anthropomorphize a cow than a fetus. Also, if the tables were turned, cows wouldn't hesitate one moment to eat us. You can tell it from their facial expression.
And congratulations on coining the phrase "fart forth." My New Year's resolution will be to spread the usage of it to other economic journals.
ok i nearly fell off my chair laughing at this.
Animal protein is fundamentel to humans nutrition, so the more efficiently we can produce animals, the better.
On top of this, in many areas the only way to extract a benefit from the land is to have animals grazin it.
The article says ´meat is an inefficient source of calories´, but it is the better source of proteins and fat humans can have (animal protein is better digested by us than any other)
Today it would be impossible to feed the world without intensive agriculture and animal breeding: We need more technology in these sectors to be approved so that the use of resources diminishes and food is available to all (GMO´s). Societies that use pastorialism are poor and hungre, where industrial technology is available, we have wholesome, abundant, safe and affordable meat, eggs and milk
spam filter won't let me comment!
I am not sure where your "protein" causes diabetes as protein is moved about the body as amino acids that have little to do with insulin/glycogen. Conversely then, it is all the "grains" converted to carbohydrate that are over consumed. But that too, is too simplistic for we require carbohydrates and fats for the energy to survive.
Eating too many calories for modern sedentary lifestyles - yes, that is true. However the only way to moderate that is either to make such foods prohibitively expensive ("fat taxes" if you will), or to ration foods - as was done in many countries during WW2. It is said, and I am not sure of the veracity of the statement, that the population of Britain was better fed under rationing than in peacetime. Apparently achieved by ensuring that everyone was allocated meats, grains and fats equitably.
I'm not sure that rationing would be accepted to day.
"you need about 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef"
Maybe this is valid for cattle raised indoors, on grain feed; on exclusively free range grass-fed zebu cattle here in Brazil, which drink about 80 litres of water per day and after 4 years produce about 250kg of beef, this amounts to less than 500 l/kg, well below the figure in the article; I doubt processing after slaughter uses over 14,000 litres/kg or 3.5 million litres per animal!
Besides, as other readers have commented, grass-fed cattle often use land only marginally suited for plantations (think of cattle and goats in semi-arid parts of Brazil and Africa) and produce much more than beef alone.