Meat Consumption and Climate Change

by Letters Editor · November 4, 2016

Newspapers have reported that 60 chefs would be serving meals such as curries, lasagne, hamburgers, boerewors rolls and biltong snacks to the 15000 delegates at the United Nations COP17 climate change conference in Durban.

Serving meat-based meals at COP17 was heavily ironic and singularly inappropriate, given that the same United Nations, in the 2006 report of its Food and Agriculture Organisation, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Livestock and Climate Change, concluded that the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale.

The report found that livestock production accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 9% of carbon dioxide and 37% of methane gas emissions worldwide. This is more than all cars, trucks, trains, boats and planes put together.

The global meat industry may also well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity. It is a major polluter, with the runoff of fertiliser and animal waste contaminating water systems, creating dead zones in coastal areas and smothering coral reefs.

Raising animals for meat requires massive amounts of land, food, energy and water. It takes more than 20000 litres of water a dwindling resource to produce 1kg of beef, but only 227 litres to produce 1kg of wheat and 454 litres for 1kg of rice. Since 1960, some 25% of Central America’s rain forests have been burned and cleared to graze beef cattle. It has been estimated that every 120g hamburger made from rain forest beef destroys 16m2 of tropical rain forest.

The meat-based diet is one of the structures whereby the rich dominate the poor. Though some 800 million people on the planet suffer from hunger or malnutrition, we feed three-quarters of the grain, soybeans and corn we grow to the cattle, pigs and chickens we raise for meat.

If we stopped breeding all these billions of animals for slaughter and grew these crops to feed humans, we could easily feed every single person on this planet with healthy and affordable plant foods. But instead, children in the developing world starve alongside fields of food destined for export as animal feed to the meat-hungry cultures of the rich world.

Then, with our hunting spears, knives, rifles, gin traps, snares, factory farms, dairies, battery hen cages, fishing nets, abattoirs and butcher shops, there is also the horrendous cruelty and slavery meted out to the animals who become the food on our plates.

The time for all of us to start eating more responsibly is overdue. Meatless Mondays, or even better, a vegetarian (or better still, a vegan) diet, could be considered as responsible and ethical responses to climate change and other urgent social justice issues.

Rather than feeding on burgers, boerewors rolls and biltong snacks, the COP17 delegates could have been setting a wonderful example and doing much to raise awareness of climate change and world poverty, and to promote a less violent and more compassionate animal-friendly world, if the meals served at the conference were all vegan, or at least vegetarian. Updated from 2011