The Meat Crisis

Developing more Sustainable and Ethical Production and Consumption

Joyce D'Silva, John Webster, Joyce D'Silva, John Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317203131
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Animal Husbandry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Meat and dairy production and consumption are in crisis. Globally, 70 billion farm animals are used for food production every year. It is well accepted that livestock production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) predicts a rough doubling of meat and milk consumption in the first half of the 21st century, with particularly rapid growth occurring in the developing economies of Asia. What will this mean for the health and wellbeing of those animals, of the people who consume ever larger quantities of animal products, and for the health of the planet itself?

The new edition of this powerful and challenging book explores the impacts of the global growth in the production and consumption of meat and dairy, including cultural and health factors, and the implications of the likely intensification of farming for both small-scale producers and for animals. Several chapters explore the related environmental issues, from resource use of water, cereals and soya, to the impact of livestock production on global warming and issues concerning biodiversity, land use and the impacts of different farming systems on the environment. A final group of chapters addresses ethical and policy implications for the future of food and livestock production and consumption.

Since the first edition, published in 2010, all chapters have been updated, three original chapters re-written and six new chapters added, with additional coverage of dietary effects of milk and meat, antibiotics in animal production, and the economic, political and ethical dimensions of meat consumption. The overall message is clearly that we must eat less meat to help secure a more sustainable and equitable world.

Part I
The impacts of animal farming on the planet

1
How to Raise Livestock – And How Not to

Colin Tudge

Most shocking in the modern world is the contrast between what could be and what is. Biologically speaking, the human species should be near the beginning of its evolutionary run. Tsunamis and volcanoes happen, and asteroids are a constant threat, but the long history of the world suggests that with average luck our species should last for another million years – and then our descendants might draw breath and contemplate the following million. Experience and simple extrapolation suggest that if we manage the world well, it is perfectly capable of supporting all of us to a very high standard through all that time – the 7 billion or so who are with us now, and the 9.5 to 10 billion who will be with us within a few decades. Yet we are being warned from all sides – not simply, these days, by professional environmental-ists but also by popes, archbishops, scientists, and some economists, that if we go on as we are, then the human species will be lucky to survive the present century in a tolerable or even in a recognizable form.

All too obviously, on all sides, the world is falling about our ears. The world’s economies have not recovered from the collapse of the banks in 2008 – and, more to the point, it’s clear to everyone who does not have a serious vested interest in the status quo that the prevailing, neoliberal economy, taking its lead from the “deregulated”, maximally competitive global market, just will not do. In theory and demonstrably in practice it cannot deliver justice and security; yet all attempts to install alternatives are fiercely resisted. Worse still, the non-renewable resources on which we have come to depend – notably oil – are all too clearly finite, while those that theoretically are renewable or recyclable – fresh water, fertile soils, phosphorus – are dissipated far faster than they can be replenished. All the world’s major habitats are compromised, down to and including the deep oceans. Half of all our fellow creatures are conservatively estimated to be in realistic danger of extinction within a century or so. A billion people – one in seven – are now undernourished. Another billion suffer “diseases of excess”, or perhaps of covert deficiency: the world population of diet-related diabetics is now more than twice that of Russia. A billion live in urban slums – almost a third of all city-dwellers. Yet still the world’s governments equate urbanization with progress.

Agriculture is at the heart of all these setbacks – affected directly by all of them, and a significant cause of most of them. And at the heart of all that is wrong with agriculture is livestock – again the victim and a principal cause of much that is awry with all the rest.

Nothing can be put right ad hoc. Everything depends on everything else. No individual mistake can be corrected without attending to all the others. We can’t put agriculture on a secure and stable course unless we also create an economy that is sympathetic to sound farming, instead of one that, as now, makes it well-nigh impossible to farm sensibly without going bust. Farmers cannot produce good food by good means and sell it for what it is really worth unless people at large are prepared to pay for it – which means the world needs to restore its food cultures – and unless people are able to afford it – which brings us back to the economy. We cannot tackle any of the problems unless we give a damn, which is a matter of morality. It is very difficult, too, to make serious changes without the assistance or at least the compliance of governments – but the world’s most powerful governments no longer seem to think it is their job to govern. They interfere with our lives but that is not the same thing at all. Certainly, Britain’s governments since the 1970s have as a matter of policy handed over their traditional powers to the “the market”, and to international agencies such as the World Trade Organization, which affect to oversee that market. As one professor of food policy has commented, Britain’s food policy these past 30 years has been, “Leave it to Tesco”.

Yet the world is still a wonderful place – extraordinarily productive and obliging, and far more resilient than we have a right to expect. Human beings are intelligent, skilful and despite appearances are steeped in what Adam Smith called “natural sympathy”: not wanting their fellows or their fellow creatures to suffer, recognizing the debt that we all owe to each other. We have science, which gives us extraordinary insights, and ought to be one of the great assets of humankind, and technologies that give us extraordinary power, including “high” technologies – the kind that emerge from science. We should not be in a mess.

One essential – the sine qua non indeed – is to ensure good food for all, produced in ways that do not wreck the biosphere and wipe out our fellow creatures. But is this really possible?

Yes, is the answer – but not by the methods now advocated and foisted upon us by the ruling oligarchy of corporates and governments, and their chosen intellectual and expert advisers. We need to begin again from first principles.

How to feed everybody well and why livestock is crucial

Farming has to be productive of course, but it also has to be both sustainable and resilient: not wrecking the rest of the world as the decades pass, and able to change direction as conditions change – which is especially necessary as the climate shifts. But nature itself shows how all this can be achieved. Wild nature has been continuously productive through hugely turbulent changes of circumstance for 3.8 billion years. Farming is an artifice of course – a human creation – but if we want it to serve us well, and go on serving us, and not kill everything else, then we should seek to emulate nature. This is the principle of “agroecology”.

So how does nature achieve its ends? In general, it is self-renewing – it taps in to renewable energy, which mainly (though not quite exclusively) is solar energy, and recycles the non-renewables: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water, and all the rest. It manages all this with enviable efficiency because it is so diverse – millions of different species (we don’t know how many, but perhaps around 8 million) acting in rivalry but also more importantly in concert; and it’s because the system is so diverse that it is also so resilient. No one disaster can destroy everything – there have always been survivors through all the mass extinctions – and over time, all the creatures within the system, and the ecosystems as a whole, evolve, and adapt. The relationship between plants and animals, which are often perceived to be “dominant” because they are big and pro-active, is synergistic. The plants convert solar energy and minerals into carbohydrates, proteins, and the rest; and the animals plus the fungi, protozoans, and microbes (bacteria and archaeans) help to keep everything cycling.

Farming that emulated nature would be the same: deriving its inputs from renewables, wasting nothing, diverse, low-input – basically organic – balancing crops (plants) against livestock (animals). In principle this is simple. Natural.

In practice, in basic structure, this is how agriculture generally has been for the past 10,000 years. The emphasis in most traditional farming has been on crops, which must be grown on the prime land. The staples, mainly cereals, are grown by arable techniques (on the field scale), while most of the rest are raised by horticulture (on the garden scale). Traditional farmers everywhere commonly grew and grow many different crops – often a huge variety. Except in extreme circumstances (as in extensive grasslands and the highest altitudes and latitudes) livestock are kept mainly or exclusively to supplement the crops. They too are diverse – if not in species then certainly genetically. Overall, traditional farming is and was “polycultural”.

In the West, it has been fashionable of late to argue that livestock are a drain on resources – and to suggest that they exacerbate global warming by producing methane gas as a by-product of rumination. In practice, in the modern world, both these criticisms are to some extent justified – but only because we do things badly: specifically, in general, because we have largely replaced traditional farming with industrial agribusiness.

Thus conceptually, and traditionally, livestock falls into two categories. On the one hand there are the specialist herbivores, both ruminants (cattle and sheep the main ones, with goats and deer as minor players) and hind-gut digesters such as horses and rabbits (which are important in some economies). Camels may be seen as “pseudo-ruminants”, roughly similar to cattle in the way they deal with herb-age, but differing in some details. In a state of nature the specialist herbivores derive most of their energy from cellulose – and this is an extraordinary trick to pull, and an extraordinarily valuable one, for cellulose is the most common organic polymer in nature. It is present and usually the prime component of every plant cell wall and so is common to all plants, growing in all circumstances. In nature at large there are megatonnes of it.

Human beings cannot derive significant quantities of energy from cellulose, but by raising specialist herbivores they gain vicarious access to the cornucopia that cellulose has to offer. Not every specialist herbivore can make use of every kind of leaf or stem – many plants are frankly toxic and/or protect themselves with thorns and whiskers and mucilage. But between them our domestic animals can derive nourishment from most common plants, which means that they can at least survive in most environments, and positively thrive in warm and rainy seasons when the plants are flourishing. So people who keep the right kinds of herbivores in the right proportions can survive in the most hostile landscapes. So it was that Job and his kin, in the Old Testament, lived very well in the desert (at least when he wasn’t being assaulted by various plagues) with his mixed herd of cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys, and camels – the proportions spelled out in the Book of Job and still to be found in some African herds.

Even when the plants are dying and the livestock are hungry and losing weight, they still can be killed for meat. The food they supply doesn’t even need to be stored and carried. Obligingly, it moves itself around. When the plants are growing, or are about to, the animals give birth – and then their owners live on their milk. Indeed, in well-run desert communities, the animals are killed for meat only in times of drought, when the vegetation languishes and they are liable to die anyway. Hence the Jewish edict in Leviticus: not to eat meat and drink milk at the same meal. (I was once told off in a Kosher restaurant for drinking milky tea with a salt beef sandwich.) The Masai drink the blood of their cattle, bleeding them at judicious intervals. Nor are livestock kept only for food. They are the source of textiles (wool) and leather, of fertility, of fuel (cow dung), and their bones are used to make tools and furniture and even sometimes for building. In much of the world animals are the chief transport and pull tractors and harvesters for good measure. This is no anachronism. In some parts of the world and some economies animal power is still the best. The sacred cows of India produced calves that were castrated to make oxen for draught power – and these were almost free because the cows traditionally were not fed: they fed themselves from wayside weeds and crop residues. In much of Africa cattle and sometimes goats are the principal currency; and currency in the form of cattle, unlike currency in the form of banknotes, or – as is the case nowadays – as figures in a computer, is real. In short, cattle and sheep may be a luxury in the middle-class West, but they are at the heart of some of the world’s most venerable cultures (as clearly demonstrated throughout the Bible).

The second category of livestock is the omnivores – pigs and poultry. Both can derive some energy from cellulose – though opinions differ on this, and the ability seems to vary somewhat from breed to breed. On the whole, pigs and poultry eat the same kinds of things that humans eat. Yet their culinary standards are not high. So they are traditionally raised on leftovers – food wastes and crop surpluses. Hence they supplement the overall economy. Furthermore, pigs in particular are great cultivators, eating weeds and digging up the soil and fertilizing it. Indeed, they have often been kept for this alone, with the...