Cancun -- As more than 190 government delegations gather in Cancun, Mexico, for the global climate talks, one topic isn't on the menu in any substantial portion: the intensive system of rearing animals for food known as factory farming. But conference delegates ignore the rapid spread of intensive animal agriculture at the planet's -- and millions of people's -- peril.
Approximately 18 percent of climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHGs) can be attributed to the livestock industry, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That's almost equal to the GHG toll from destruction or degradation of the world's forests. A more recent estimate by current and former World Bank environmental specialists puts livestock's share of GHGs much higher, at 51 percent of the global total.
A vast number of animals -- approximately 60 billion -- are used in food production around the world every year. As the global farmed animal population increases (to perhaps 100 billion by 2050, if current trends persist), and with it, the number of factory farms and feedlots, GHG emissions will rise exponentially, too.
GHGs are generated at every stage of livestock production: carbon dioxide through the transport of animals, powering mechanized facilities, and producing chemical fertilizers to grow "feed" grains. Large quantities of methane are released by enteric fermentation -- the digestive processes of cows -- and by animals' manure.
Methane has more than 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide and a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere; if quantities were reduced rapidly, the global warming effect would be substantial. Animals' manure also emits nitrous oxide, a GHG with nearly 300 times carbon dioxide's warming potential.
Brazil, China, and India are all emerging economic powers. Each is playing a central role in the direction of the Cancun talks. Each is also a crucial force shaping 21st century animal agriculture -- and with it, climate realities, too. Ethiopia, although far from a fast-food nation, is Africa's largest producer and exporter of livestock.
In all four countries, as in others in the global South, a growing share of water, grain, land, forests, and climate "space" are being directed to the meat and dairy industries. This is coming at a considerable cost, not only to the global climate, but also to food security, ecological sustainability, livelihoods, equity, animal welfare, and public health at the national level.
Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse, is the world's largest exporter of beef and chicken, and a lead exporter of soy for farmed animal feed. Brazil's expanding livestock sector is intimately linked with global markets for agricultural commodities -- be they beef, poultry, pork, soybeans, or leather. During the global recession, rates of deforestation in Brazil dropped to their lowest levels in 20 years. But as demand for commodities like beef and soy edged back up in 2010, deforestation levels doubled from those in 2009.
Brazil is the world's most biologically diverse nation. It is also the world's fourth-largest emitter of GHGs, principally due to the burning of its forests for agricultural expansion. According to a report by Friends of the Earth-Amazonia, the Brazilian National Instiitute for Space Research, and the University of Brasília concluded that fully half of Brazil's GHG emissions between 2003 and 2008 came from the cattle sector alone.
Only two generations after a devastating national famine, China is eating increasingly high on the food chain. Over the past decade, consumption of China's most popular meat, pork, has doubled. In 2007, China raised well over half a billion pigs. China, the world's largest emitter of GHGs, has committed to increasing its production of pork and to expanding meat exports, even as domestic food prices rise and animal agriculture has become a major source of serious water pollution.
While ethical vegetarianism has a several-thousand-year history in India, more than half of India's 1.17 billion people now consider themselves omnivores. India's booming middle class is driving up demand for meat, eggs, and dairy products. India has the world's largest dairy herd, 300 million strong, and is the world's third largest producer of eggs and sixth largest producer of poultry meat.
Ethiopia, at a very different level of development, is nonetheless looking to produce more meat and dairy products for export, although food security for its fast-growing population remains elusive and soil erosion and land degradation are extensive.
At the same time, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, and India are experiencing the effects of climate change -- more frequent drought and floods, higher temperatures, and increasingly erratic weather -- all of which will challenge their ability to produce enough food and to sustain expanding human and animal populations.
It's increasingly clear that food and agricultural need to be central to climate policy, including any agreements on stemming deforestation, transferring green technologies, and funding poorer countries' adaptation to global warming.
Continuing to marginalize animal agriculture in international debates over climate policy means forfeiting a crucial opportunity to reduce global GHGs and to create a more sustainable, equitable, humane, and climate-compatible food system. There are NGOs in Cancun sharing pieces of this message. Will governments offer them a place at the table? If they don't, it looks like more bitter harvests ahead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=gTS2Yp-UgI0
Here is a link that may update you, and also you can go into www.SupremeMasterTV.com as there are numerous scientists, climatologists, glaciologists, professors, all giving information about the results of animal agriculture around the Planet, it is all free to download.
Imagine the world's rivers and underground aquifers drained to provide irrigation water for vast soy and corn monocultures covering millions of acres, drenched in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides in arid areas not suited for farming. (the American West).
Now imagine that all these irrigation canals and dams, built to water crops, killing billions of river fish around the world that can't live in shallow, warm, stagnant river water which has been drained for farm irrigation.
Now imagine the coastal marine life which feeds on these river fish....fish which often migrate out to the oceans and become food for marine mammals....being killed from irrigation drained and dammed rivers, rivers filled with agricultural pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers.
Now imagine some of the most species diverse lands on earth (praries) destroyed to plant these chemical drenched soy and corn monocultures. Imagine thousands of species of grasses, flowers and other grassland plants and shrubs destroyed because the world believes "vegan" automatically means good. Imagine millions of antelope and other grazing animals dying from lack of habitat and grasses.
Now imagine millions of acres of tropical rainforest being cleared to plant soy and corn mono-cultures which drives indigenous forest people into urban ghettos.
Vegan does not automatically equal good for land, water, animals or people.
Also, if you took the time to read up on Allan Savory (among others) you would know that the ecological benefits of pastured meat isn't "sheer fantasy".
Pastured beef might be a little better than conventional beef in terms of emissions, but it still produces more emissions than just about any other way of feeding ourselves - whether pork, poultry, and lowest of all, plant-based sources like soy and wheat. (for example see http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/research/marketing_files/Pelletier_Agricultural_Systems_beef.pdf. Here's an accessible discussion of the study: http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/research/marketing_files/lca_beef.pdf). That isn't to say that we should all go vegan, but eating more plant-based meals instead of animal ones (or chicken instead of beef) is a pretty clear environmental win, and it should land the livestock industry on the to-do list for climate policy meetings like the one in Cancun.
In full disclosure, I'm an activist on this topic, directing the PB&J Campaign (http://www.pbjcampaign.org), which advocates for people to eat more plant-based meals to help the environment.
Bernard Brown
Livestock's Long Shadow proposes that pastured beef has significantly more adverse impacts than does factory-farmed beef.
Further, the lead author of Livestock's Long Shadow along with one of its co-authors have proposed that sustainability in agriculture can be completely achieved through (a) more intensification of animal agriculture, and (b) replacing beef with chicken and pork, while encouraging meat production to double by 2050. See these conclusions of theirs at http://www.pnas.org/content/107/43/18237.extract
Conversely Goodland and Anhang, cited by Mr. Brown, have published multiple writings showing how the environmental impacts of various meat products are much more similar than proposed by Livestock's Long Shadow -- and that global warming can be slowed or stopped only if animal agriculture is reduced.
These lands are better suited for free range/grass fed cattle ranching which require no fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation water or feed. You just turn them loose and let them do what the buffalo did for millions of years...eat naturally occurring prarie grasses.
Some areas of the world are NOT fit for cattle grazing, such as the tropics where tropical forest clearing can cause the soil to be scorched by intense year round tropical sun and heavy tropical rains which dry out and wash away top soil. These soils have been protected by the tropical forest canopy for thousands or millions of years.
If everyone became a vegan the world's prarie grasses and prarie insects, birds, antelope and other prarie animals would soon be pushed out of existence as soy and corn monopolized the land and destroyed diversity.
90% of the world's soy is fed to animals, and about 50% of the world's grain in general.
Most water outside of cities is used for crop production and the irrigation of grazing land.
Without meat and dairy consumption, most agricultural land will be freed up for afforestation, and fresh water will be in much greater supply.
If everyone became vegan, we'd live in a natural utopia.
Most irrigation is used to grow fruits and vegetables in arid regions (California and Mexico) or in regions where the bedrock is too porous to hold much water. Most grains and all pastures are watered by rain.
Corn and soy fed cattle consume massive amounts of water per cow because of the intensive irrigation needed to grow corn and soy, free range/grass fed cattle do not consume large amounts of water because they eat prarie grass, which grows naturally in the midwest and is rain fed.
Grass fed free/range organic cattle consume much less water per cow and are beneficial to naturally occurring grasslands like the great plains in the U.S., where cattle are now filling the ecological niche left open by their close cousins....buffalo, which....sadly, have been largely eliminated from the great plains of the U.S.
FREE RANGE/GRASS fed cattle are extremely beneficial to the great plains if managed properly by cattle ranchers.
Replacing beef with a vegetarian diet of soy and corn can be quite damaging to the great plains where enormous soy and corn deserts are drenched with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers which kill insect life and destroy native prarie grasses which beef cattle could feed on.
These crops also require massive amounts of irrigation water, which comes from the underground Ogalla Aquifer (underground lake).
For instance, GHG emissions caused from burning rain forest was included as output for meat animals as well as transportation output.
In addition, while no one would dispute the bad effects of factory farming animals in many ways, GHG are really the least problem.
Rice paddies produce far more methane than meat animals and yet, no one ever talks about eliminating rice from our diets.
What are the author's solutions? None are presented absolutely except for targeting meat animals as the problem.
The vast acres necessary to feed people on plant matter alone would cause far more devastation to the earth's eco-systems than properly pastured animals, raised as part of what is used to feed the world.
In so many ways, agriculture is the worst thing that could have happened to the planet.
Here are some links: (My usual link from NOAA doesn't want to load today, but it is the last one.)
http://www.ghgonline.org/methanerice.htm
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/23/meat-dairy-diet-not-tied-to-global-warming/
http://www.igac.noaa.gov/newsletter/highlights/1996/ch4.php
And of course you are right. No one wants to talk about the rice paddies. Although there are ways the actual farmers and environmentalists are trying to do something about it. If you drain the fields once a season I think it helps cut the methane by almost a third.
The farmers still get the advantages of pest control but less methane.