G Magazine: Opinion
by Brian Sherman

What we eat affects more than just our health and waistlines – it can ease the squeeze on the environment too.

The debate about climate change has been raging for a few years now and it is certainly beginning to heat up. However, there is one simple thing not being mentioned in global warming rhetoric: our diets.

Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory identified agriculture as responsible for around 15 per cent of net national greenhouse emissions in 2005. On average, Australians eat more than 100 kilograms of meat per person each year. Cut out just beef from your diet and you’ll save 1.45 tonnes of greenhouse gas per year. If you reduced your dairy intake by just two cups of milk per week, you would save 250 kg of greenhouse pollution in a year.

But with the increasing income of many nations today, there is a growing and unprecedented demand for animal products. A United Nations report states that “the global livestock sector is growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector”. Global meat production is projected to double over the next 40 years, and demand for milk and eggs is also set to increase.

Greater demand leads to intensification of processes to get the animal to the plate in the most economical way. Farming in Australia, and across the world, has changed dramatically. Long gone are the days of Old MacDonald’s farm with cows, chickens and pigs grazing happily on green grass in front of a picturesque barn.

The intensification of farming processes has also resulted in large multinational companies dominating the global meat and dairy trade. Currently, 50 per cent of global pork production and more than 70 per cent of global chicken production comes from industrial systems – from factory farms. Small Australian farmers are being forced out of business, consumed by multi-national agribusinesses with whose efficiency of scale they cannot compete.

However, in terms of environmental impact, it would be of no use simply to move all the animals in factory farms outdoors to graze. Australia’s delicate soil is not able to cope with the pressure of millions of non-native, hard-hoofed animals such as pigs, sheep and cattle. In Australia, 58 per cent of the land mass is already used for agriculture, principally for grazing animals and the production of crops used in animal feed. This is more than half our country’s land area. Grazing animals cause a multitude of problems for Australia’s eco-systems, such as compacted soil, topsoil loss and water pollution, to name a few.

However, factory farming creates an equivalent environmental disaster. Animals in factory farms are fed on cereals and soya. Some 670 million tonnes of cereals were fed to livestock in 2002. This is projected to increase to 1 billion tonnes of feed in the next 20 years. Cereals and soya are grown on land that has been converted from natural habitats – forests and grasslands – into croplands and paddocks for grazing. Since the 1960s, approximately 200 million hectares of the world’s tropical forest has been destroyed, mostly for cattle grazing and growing crops for animal feed. We need to consider the energy consumed by the production and transport of these huge amounts of feed. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to eat the crops directly, rather than feeding them to a cow?

At the end of the day, if we are serious about addressing climate change, we need to broaden our focus and consider how our food choices impact upon all beings with whom we share this planet. Reducing your meat and dairy consumption or, even better, committing to a vegetarian or vegan diet, is the easiest thing every one of us can do to address global warming. The time has come to factor meat into our carbon footprint.

Brian Sherman is a co-founder and co-director of animal rights group, Voiceless.

Did you like this article? Share it!