Balancing the global need for meat

Carlos Sere, BBC Green Room 24 Mar 09;

While meat is all too abundant in the rich North, it is very often a life-saving source of protein in the developing South, says Carlos Sere. In this week's Green Room, he says backing a worldwide curb on meat consumption is likely to do more harm than good.

Daisy the cow, the emblem of healthy wholesome living, is under attack in rich countries.

She is deemed to be destroying the environment by emitting tonnes of greenhouse gases and contributing to an upsurge of obesity and heart disease.

But Daisy, and her farmyard cousins Billy the goat and Porky the pig, are treasured in poor countries.

These animals provide protein, nourishment, and a livelihood to more than a billion poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Rich and poor worlds are colliding when it comes to the value of livestock production and consumption.

In this case, both points are understandable - for their own worlds. The rich world may need to cut back on livestock consumption and production, but the poor world cannot afford to do so.

'Factory farming'

According to a recent report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock production, dominated in the West by large-scale factory farming, is responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions; a bigger share than all of the world's transport.

But as the world moves to address climate change and reduce emissions, we must make sure that the push to reduce the environmental impact of livestock production in rich countries does not hurt the availability of milk, meat, eggs, and other products in developing countries.

While people in rich nations are harming their health by eating too much fatty red meat and cheese, many people in the cities and rural areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, particularly children and women in their child-bearing years, are malnourished because they are not consuming enough eggs, meat, and milk.

Research shows that very modest amounts of animal-sourced foods in the diets of the poor can have tremendous health benefits.

Milk and meat enhance the growth and cognitive development of children subsisting largely on starchy diets.

Livestock producers in rich countries practice factory farming, which can treat animals inhumanely and depends on vast amounts of resources, particularly in the forms of water, cereals, and energy.

However, most livestock producers in poor countries operate small family farms with just a few animals that, while producing methane gas, roam free and eat grass and other wastes rather than grain.

Meeting needs

Concern for the environment is legitimate, but it should not override concern for the livelihoods of 1.2 billion poor people.

Science can serve as an honest broker in the complex and often controversial debate over livestock and environmental issues.

Our role may be inconvenient to some, but empirical evidence is needed in this discussion.

The global agricultural research community is working to develop a more comprehensive, integrated agenda that should provide crucial, objective evidence on the trade-offs between food security, livelihoods and the environment.

Our research tells us that we can often protect the livestock livelihoods of poor people while also conserving environmental resources.

Among the ideas being discussed in rich countries to reduce consumption of livestock foods are a "methane tax" on large feeding operations.

It is based on emission measurements and encouraging a "locavore" movement, creating demand for local livestock products not produced by large-scale, factory farm operations.

Such ideas are worth considering, but they will need research analyses and political debate, and eventual buy-in, to take hold.

Livestock production remains an essential pathway out of poverty in many poor countries, where increasing consumption of animal products also helps reduce malnutrition among the poorest communities.

When allocating resources for agricultural development, which is a long-neglected sector, policymakers and aid agencies need to use different strategies for different regions and populations.

Now we need both worlds to understand one another.

The view from the North and the South - from the feedlots of Chicago and the semi-desert scrublands of Somalia and Ethiopia, from those who eat too much protein and those who eat too little - is very different.

When advocating policies that affect the developing world, we must respect all ways of life, including those born of necessities now remote in the developed world.

If you are asking people in New York, London or Tokyo to reduce their meat consumption for the good of their health and the environment, that is reasonable.

But asking a family on the edge of the Sahara Desert or the outskirts of the packed slums of Mumbai to give up protein from animal foods, particularly milk, is a quite different request.

As a proverb in the Horn of Africa goes: if the herds die, then the people will die too.

Dr Carlos Sere is executive director of the International Livestock Research Institute

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website