May 25, 2022

 

Academics say Australians should cut eating meat to mitigate environmental impact

 

 

Academics who have reviewed the impact of agriculture on the planet are calling on Australians to cut meat intake from their diets.

 

In a new book called "Food in a Planetary Emergency", authors Diana Bogueva and Dora Marinova say food production is responsible for more than a third of the world's greenhouse gases and for the extinction of a large number of wildlife species due to land clearing.

 

However, Meat and Livestock Australia managing director Jason Strong slammed the book as "outdated", describing it as "a naive interpretation" of information.

 

Dr. Bogueva, from the University of Sydney's Centre for Advanced Food Engineering, said farming was putting enormous strain on the environment through a loss of biodiversity, deforestation, loss of savanna, plastics pollution, exhaustion of the planet's soils, overuse of freshwater and exploitation of species.

 

The book summarises the findings of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and meta-analyses on the link between food and environmental impact. It calls for change in areas ranging from food waste and packaging pollution to meat consumption, circular agriculture and flexitarianism, which is a mostly plant-based diet that allows for the occasional meat dish.

 

Professor Marinova said two-thirds of the planet's wildlife had become extinct in the past 50 years, according to a study by the World Wildlife Fund in 2020. She added that clearing land for livestock production or to produce food for livestock didn't make sense as cattle needed 38 calories of feed to produce one calorie of beef for human consumption.

 

"That's a very inefficient and I would say irrational way of feeding the population because rather than growing the grain or the food we need for human consumption, we are growing the grain for the animals and then eating them," Professor Marinova said.

 

She said a cut in meat consumption would mean less land would be needed for livestock production.

 

The authors cited a report by EAT-Lancet which suggested consumers should cut meat consumption by 80-90%. They claimed going flexitarian would drastically reduce greenhouse emissions and decrease the impact of farming on the environment.

 

Professor Marinova said making the switch to vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and fruits could be difficult as Australians were "addicted to meat" but she said Generation Z, people born after 1995, were changing their habits.

 

"They are quite keen to increase their consumption of traditional plant-based food such as fruit and vegetables, legumes, tubers, but they are more hesitant to go to alternative proteins despite this industry essentially booming," Professor Marinova said.

 

On the other hand, Jason Strong, while acknowledging that the rapid loss of wildlife was worrying, said the beef industry had a plan to be carbon neutral by 2030 and farmers were trialing methods of increasing biodiversity.

 

"Agriculture is conscious of the need to be long term sustainable [and] is responding faster than anybody else," he said.

 

Strong rejected the EAT-Lancet report recommendation to reduce meat consumption, saying it was biased and largely discredited.

 

He said the authors had misrepresented the food production system and they were wrong about calorie conversion rates, cattle emissions and land clearing.

 

"We're going to have 2.2 billion more people by 2050 and we're going to need all the sustainable food production we can get," Strong commented. "We're not going to be able to do it by people selectively sniping at different parts of the supply chain."

 

- ABC Rural