Last week I reported on the findings of a new Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report linking beef consumption to deforestation and climate change. I noted that most Americans are likely aware that eating beef poses potential health risks, but most are likely unaware of the connection between beef and global warming.
The report's main point? Consumer choices make a difference at both the personal and global level. The report's main message? Americans would better protect their health and the planet if they ate less beef.
The blog generated more than 750 comments, both positive and negative. Some detractors took issue with the studies that found eating beef is a health risk. Others insisted that cattle production is not the main driver of deforestation in Latin America. And some didn't understand how U.S. beef eaters could play a role in destroying forests in Latin America.
Given the keen interest in this issue, I thought it would be helpful to bring the lead author of the report, Doug Boucher, into the conversation. Boucher, who has a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology, is UCS's director of climate research and analysis as well as the director of the organization's Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative. I asked him to address some questions based on comments from last week.
First, I wanted to ask you about the health problems associated with eating beef. I know that wasn't what your report was about, but in my blog I noted that numerous studies--including a recent one published by the Harvard School of Public Health--have linked consumption of beef and other red meat to heart disease, cancer and other serious health problems. Is there any question about the health risks associated with eating beef?
The Harvard School of Public Health paper is just the latest of a number of scientific studies documenting the negative impact of eating beef on your health. The Harvard study is especially notable because it included an enormous number of participants (more than 120,000); lasted for more than 20 years; and controlled for many other variables, including age, gender, smoking, alcohol, vitamins, physical activity and aspirin use, as well as many diseases, medical conditions and consumption of other kinds of food. Those foods included processed meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, fruits, dairy, and on and on. After correcting for the effects of all these additional factors, the Harvard researchers found strong evidence that the more beef you eat, the more likely you are to get heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and die early. It found very strong scientific evidence that beef is bad for you, and as I said, it's only the most recent of many studies that have come to similar conclusions.
It bothers me when people dismiss scientific results they don't like by saying the studies are "just observational" and therefore not really scientific. Epidemiology is one of the many well-established sciences that are based mostly on observations, combined with sophisticated data analysis and mathematical modeling. We know that tobacco causes cancer, lead paint damages children's brains, and fruits and vegetables are good for you from epidemiological studies. Other similar "observational" sciences include archeology, astronomy, climate science, evolutionary biology, geology and paleontology.
Should we reject all that these sciences have discovered because those discoveries are "just" based on observations? Some people would do exactly that. We've seen attacks on evolutionary biology and paleontology by creationists, on climate science by global-warming deniers, and on epidemiology by tobacco companies. This kind of argument isn't new, but for me, as a scientist, it's disturbing that it's still so common.
Some commenters disputed the fact that tropical deforestation is primarily driven by cattle production. Could you explain how ranchers interact with loggers in Latin America?
The claim that tropical deforestation is due to logging and that ranchers are just putting the cleared land to good use afterward belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how tropical forests are logged in Latin America. Logging in the region is almost entirely selective. Loggers are not clearcutting the forest. They take out a small percentage of the trees--the few commercially valuable species--and leave more than 80 percent of the trees standing. They are often followed by ranchers, who use the logging roads to bring in bulldozers, but not because the land is cleared and would otherwise go to waste. On the contrary, if it weren't for ranchers and farmers clearing the forest entirely, the forest would still be extremely valuable by providing habitat for wildlife and sequestering carbon. The roughly 20 percent of the trees cut by loggers could grow back to become even more valuable. So the beef industry can't shift the blame for deforestation onto the logging industry. Both are involved, but the main driver of deforestation on Latin American is cattle ranching.
Could pastureland currently used solely by cattle be used for other agricultural purposes?
Much of the land used for beef cattle could be producing other, healthier, kinds of food. Of the 8.4 billion acres used for grazing worldwide, 3.5 billion acres is classified as "high productivity," and thus potentially usable for crops or for grazing dairy cattle. And of the 3.7 billion acres already used globally to produce crops, fully a third goes to producing livestock feed.
In the United States, for example, most of the pastureland in the eastern half of the country, as well as a good deal along the Pacific Coast, could be converted to cropland. So some portion of that land used to feed beef cattle could go to chickens, pigs or dairy cattle, or grains for direct human consumption. All in all, there are many more efficient alternatives for using land that currently feeds beef cattle but produces less than 5 percent of our protein and less than 2 percent of our calories. As I said in your blog, beef is an "inefficient" protein because it requires a lot of resources, especially land, but contributes relatively little to the human diet.
Could you explain in more detail the role that U.S. beef consumption plays in driving deforestation in Latin America?
We looked at the issue of meat worldwide, not just in the United States, because the markets for meat and for livestock feed have become global. Because of globalization, our demand for beef stimulates production everywhere, including in Latin American countries where pasture expansion leads to deforestation.
Here's how it works: If U.S. consumers ate less beef, U.S. producers would have more to export to other countries, displacing exports from Latin America beef producers. This operates through supply and demand, as we learned back in our introductory economics courses, but it's understandable even without going into details of how the market adjusts. The bottom line is U.S. demand for beef plays a substantial role in global markets.
What practical things can cattle ranchers, commodity farmers and beef eaters do to address this problem?
Our report offers a number of recommendations to reduce deforestation due to beef production, including ways that ranchers could raise cattle on less land, which would reduce pressure on tropical forests. They include pasture improvement, such as planting legumes and better-quality grasses; rotational grazing; increasing stocking rates, which means grazing more cattle per acre; and adopting systems that combine grazing with tree production. As an example, the report highlights the success of Brazil's voluntary 2006 soybean moratorium. The industry was able to reduce deforestation from soy production to nearly zero while expanding production and remaining profitable. And the report discusses the Brazil beef industry efforts to duplicate this success with its own moratorium starting in 2009. If it can do as well as the soy industry, it will dramatically reduce the impact of global beef consumption on deforestation.
We also included a number of suggestions for consumers. Changing your diet by eating more poultry instead of beef is just one of them. We aren't telling people to stop eating beef. We are recommending they eat less.
What about the environmental damage caused by CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)--sometimes called industrial, or factory, farms--in the United States?
UCS has looked at production systems for meat in several studies over the years, and we've generally been quite critical of CAFOs. Although that's not the focus of this report, we included a two-page section on CAFOs, and we concluded that "the pollution, animal welfare problems, and other issues associated with CAFOs make their form of meat production an unacceptable solution to deforestation."
There's a lot more to be said about CAFOs and the grass-fed and free-range alternatives. But that issue--whether to produce any kind of meat in highly concentrated, factory-farm conditions--is a different question than whether we should change our diet by consuming less beef. That's what we discuss in this report, because from the point of view of land use and the pressure on tropical forests, a diet that limited beef would be very beneficial.
Some people who posted comments on your blog apparently believe that eating beef is a fundamental part of human biology and that it can never change. That's not the case. Most countries now consume more poultry and pork than beef, and per-capita beef consumption has dropped in the last few decades in many developed countries. In the United States, for example, per-capita consumption peaked in 1976 and has fallen by about 30 percent since to an average of about 60 pounds a year.
So we certainly can shift our diet by eating less beef and more chicken and pork. We're doing it to some extent already. And as more people become aware of the implications of beef for tropical forests, the global climate and their own health, we should see more of that happening.
Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"I'm the first person to admit that we eat too much meat…We need to eat less meat and better meat."
--Fred Kirschenmann (2011)
http://www.nrdc.org/living/eatingwell/should-we-eat-meat-never.asp
“Meat consumption in the developed world needs to be cut by 50 percent per person by 2050, and emissions in all sectors – industrial and agricultural – need to be reduced by 50 percent if we are to meet the most aggressive strategy, set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to reduce the most potent of greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide (N2O).”
—Eric Davidson, Director of Woods Hole Research Center (2012)
http://www.whrc.org/news/pressroom/PR-2012-Davidson_ERL.html
“Our research clearly shows that recycling more and eating less meat could provide a key to rebalancing the global carbon cycle. Meat production involves significant energy losses: only around four per cent of crops grown for livestock turn into meat. By focusing on making agriculture more efficient and encouraging people to reduce the amount of meat they eat, we could keep global temperatures within the two degrees threshold.”
—Tom Powell (2012)
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_215120_en.html
Here are a couple other quotes from the article on Fred Kirschenmann, that completely contradict claims by US, particularly I-US's claim that food animals should be eliminated from agriculture altogether. Gee, I wonder why I-US forgot to mention them...
"Is this the only way to raise cattle, and is it impossible for meat to be produced as a "green" product? No."
"Dispersed on diversified farms, cattle are necessary to complete an important nutrient cycle, according to Kirschenmann. They can convert crop leftovers into human food, and their manure, one of the most environmentally benign sources of fertilizer, naturally improves soil quality, reduces the need for irrigation, and helps prevent erosion. Greater use of manure could lead to a reduction in the use of synthetic nitrogen, which is one of the biggest culprits in water contamination. Ruminants even contribute to the soil's natural sequestering of carbon--one of the main ways CO2 can be converted into necessary carbon in the soil is through grazing."
Tell us I-US, exactly what part of "necessary" don't you understand. You have even made the ridiculous claim that no-till ag and green manure make animals unnecessary in ag!
Evidently, some posters cannot accept the fact that we’re such creatures of habit; a plant-based diet is simply an extension of compassion for many.
I've looked over the study embedded in that link/quote, and don't see that number. Can anyone tell me what page it's on?
No regard for what would be needed to make that change was discussed in that statement. Of what use is it to anyone who is actually going to do the work of growing food? Massive new equipment investments by farmers, new market channels & infrastructure needed for those crops, MORE scarce and expensive irrigation water needed (it takes POWER to PUMP IT!), more human manual labor needed, no mention that herbicide & pesticide use would increase exponentially (don't know too many folks who bother to spray pastures), no discussion of the detrimental effect on human traditional cultural practices that can actually HELP animals such as animal husbandry, and no discussion on HOW IN THE HECK FARMERS ARE SUPPOSED TO KEEP SOIL FERTILITY LEVELS HIGH ENOUGH TO GROW MORE CROPS WITHOUT THE USE OF more MANURE/COMPOST!
Do the anti meat folks actually believe that we have an endless supply of synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus available for all that land conversion?
We need to make the most efficient, most economically sound to the farmer (and that needs to be expressed in how the 98% who don't farm spend their money), AND the most environmentally beneficial decision on these issues, as a nation; as well as tackle the problem of population. It's all one big ball of wax. Hp's constant attack on animals in farming does no one any good. Take animals out of the ag equation and you eliminate THE MAIN natural source of soil fertility, and, another market choice for growers to stay somewhat diversified and stable economically.
Almost forty years later, the distance between the two has greatly diminished. Real solutions, not polished platitudes and undue hero worship of one individual who has said countless times that his system is not applicable on a large-scale, need to be analyzed, debated, and implemented. A reduction in consumption of resource-intensive products is a reasonable solution.
As the UN commissioned report that you cited states, experts are divided between those who think that a reduction in beef consumption will help, and those who think that the real solution is for us to adopt better agricultural practices.
No one in the report was calling for an end of meat consumption, but the report repeatedly stressed in no uncertain terms that livestock is a vital, necessary part of agriculture. Everyone that I have seen commenting here agrees that industrial agriculture, both plant and animal, has many problems that need improving on. Reasonable people can disagree over how how much of which sort of livestock is best in any particular place at any given time of year. If you are now recognizing that, and not insisting that the anti-meat stance is the only acceptable viewpoint, then more power to you.
Interestingly enough, here is Salatin: "What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'"
One of the reasons the soy industry boomed so much alongside the cattle industry in Brazil was precisely the fear of BSE from nations importing Brazilian beef.
Grazing land, plus land for crops to feed animals, makes up 80 percent of all agricultural land – 3.4 billion hectares for grazing and .5 billion hectares for feed crops.38 Forests are often cleared to make space for this grazing and feedcrop land; over the last 25 years, the world has lost forests equal in size to India.39 Approximately 3 million hectares are lost per year as a result of livestock production. Some 70 percent of this loss occurs in Latin America, where forests are cleared both for grazing cattle and for feed crops."
--United Nations, "Food and Agriculture: The Future of Sustainability" (2012)
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/dsd_sd21st/21_pdf/agriculture_and_food_the_future_of_sustainability_web.pdf
You certainly are selective in what you choose to quote! Funny that you missed the parts about the essential importance of animals in agriculture, found in the same report...
"Mixed crop-livestock systems, often at a smallholder level, produce about half of the world’s food and are necessary for food security. While traditional animal husbandry is a vital and necessary part of our food systems, particularly in semi-arid areas such as the Sahel, Andes, Middle East and Central Asia, the more intensive production systems have very different resource requirements."
Do tell us, what part of "necessary for food security" and "traditional animal husbandry is a vital and necessary part of our food systems" don't you understand?
When you try to pretend that everyone else is a partner in your anti-meat crusade, and cite sources that clearly contradict your own arguments, you impugn your credibility. Here is yet another quote completely contradicting your rhetoric:
"Agricultural systems and landscapes must become vastly more diverse. At the farm level, this means crop diversification, polycultures, multiple varieties, and appropriate integration of livestock to enhance resilience, manage pest and disease risks, cycle nutrients, adapt to climate change, and use inputs most efficiently."
I'm not selectively quoting. The issue is sustainability by reducing consumption. Those other passages prove that as well. I'm not here talking about vegetarianism, neither are the authors of the report. Try to stay focused, Baroness, on the thesis of the report.
"Mixed crop-livestock systems, often at a smallholder level, produce about half
of the world’s food and are necessary for food security. "
"While traditional animal husbandry is a vital and necessary part of our food systems, particularly
in semi-arid areas such as the Sahel, Andes, Middle East and Central Asia, the more intensive production systems have very different resource requirements."
"Agricultural systems and landscapes must become vastly more diverse. At the farm level, this means crop diversification, polycultures, multiple varieties, and appropriate integration of livestock to enhance resilience, manage pest and disease risks, cycle nutrients, adapt to climate change, and use inputs most efficiently."
Do tell us, exactly what part of "necessary for food security" is it that you don't understand?
Exactly what part of "vital and necessary part of our food systems" is it that you fail to grasp?
No one in that paper argued that we should eliminate animals from agriculture, but the paper did clearly and repeatedly state that animals are a vital and necessary part of agriculture. You should try to cite sources that actually support your position, instead of impugning your own arguments.
--FAO, "Human Vitamin and Mineral Requirements"
http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/Y2809E/y2809e08.htm#bm08.1
"Animal products, both meat and dairy, in general require more resources and cause higher emissions than plant-based alternatives."
--United Nations Environmental Programme, "Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production--Priority Products and Materials" (2010)
http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx1262xPA-PriorityProductsAndMaterials_Report.pdf
"Eat more grass-fed beef and less chicken or pork."
When it comes to sustainable agriculture, Joel Salatin knows what he is talking about. Certainly vastly more than the well meaning, but completely misguided authors of the above article who have suggested that you eat more industrially produced chicken and pork, because industrially produced chicken and pork take up less room since they are jam packed in cages in giant warehouses. . Michael Pollan has called Salatin an "agricultural genius," and rightfully so.
The authors of the above article have fallen into the trap of relying on oversimplified reductionist nonsense in lieu of any real grasp of the issues at hand, which leads them to such ridiculous conclusions.
We don't need people stigmatizing beef. We need to improve our agricultural practices. Sorry, but advocating an increase in industrial pork and chicken consumption, as the authors above do, is perhaps the the most clueless solution that I have ever seen.
Sorry to tell you, but this is not an academic forum, and the above article is what is posted here to respond to, on the Huffington Post. You seem to be very confused about where you are. When you try to puff yourself up with academic rhetoric that has nothing to do with this forum, it just makes you look silly. Then again, I think I kind of enjoy your silliness. Never mind. Keep it up. Good work. Do tell us more about analyzing reports, the minds of the authors, and the inferior nature of all who dare disagree with you.
--Your comments do that work without my help.
Why don't you let them speak for themselves? That's what you told me to do when I had to explain one of grumpyfarmer's comments to you. The critiques of this report and the way it was presented at this site go far beyond "using nothing but bombast and a couple of blog postings from personal websites."
--Joel Salatin
"...the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”
~ Albert Einstein
--Joel Salatin (someone who actually knows what he is talking about)
Firstly, the above article's suggestion that it is environmentally responsible and humane to replace beef in the diet with industrially produced pork and chicken, since industrially produced pork and chicken takes up less space since they are jam packed in crates, is so profoundly misguided that a person making such a contention has no business whatsoever speaking on the matter.
Secondly, the central claim, that we should eat less beef in an effort to drive down beef prices in order to bring down the beef market in Brazil is so laughably misguided, environmentally and economically, that it is amazing that anyone would actually believe such nonsense.
Thirdly, when the above authors describe the Harvard study as "strong evidence that the more beef you eat, the more likely you are to get heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and die early" they take themselves out of the realm of being taken seriously. It's not strong evidence of anything of the sort. Zoe Harcombe points out a number of basic flaws in that argument here:
http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2012/03/red-meat-mortality-the-usual-bad-science/
Thanks for the link! Off to read it now.
Are you under the impression that vegetarian staples, such as wheat and rice, don't contribute to heart disease? Amazing.
And again, we're back to the old correlation vs. causation dilemma. According to the CDC, of persons with less than a high school diploma, nearly 10% reported a history of one or more of conditions such as MI, angina, and CHD, nearly twice the proportion among college graduates - therefore, failure to graduate high school is statistically correlated with developing heart disease. Are we then to assume that not graduating is the CAUSE of heart disease? Of course not. Same thing with consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol vs. heart disease - SOME (not all) observational studies may demonstrate a statistical link, but that's not the same thing as proving causation. Now, extremely high levels of correlation, when confounding variables have been controlled for, may SUGGEST, even STRONGLY suggest causation (such as was the case when a causative relationship between smoking and lung cancer was uncovered), but as "Baroness" points out, the most extensive meta-analysis to date regarding saturated fat and heart disease didn't even find a positive association, let alone anything to even remotely suggest a causative relationship.
Involving Hollywood as trendsetters would help....
But as meat is expensive, I think this current financial economic turmoil is bringing this cause forward in great leaps & bounds !
Have studies been sanctioned already to measure the impact form this avenue ?
Biggi
www.simplyburgenland.blogspot.com