by More than 100 world leaders at this year’s United Nations climate summit agreed to make their agricultural and food systems a key part of their plans to fight climate change, seeking improvements in a sector that accounts for around a third of emissions that warm the planet.
With livestock accounting for more than half of those emissions, meat and dairy are at the forefront of many conversations about agriculture at COP28 in Dubai. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations joined those conversations with an updated report that included ways to reduce those emissions from livestock.
“You don’t meet climate goals without doing something in the system, and in this case in livestock farming,” said Francesco Tubiello, a senior FAO statistician who worked on the report. He briefly mentions eating less meat, but mostly highlights ways the meat industry can improve productivity and efficiency.
The change will not be easy. Like fossil fuel producers, the meat industry came out forcefully to protect its interests in the talks, even presenting its practices as “sustainable nutrition,” according to one report. One potential competitor, alternative meat, has hit a rough patch after initial enthusiasm and investment.
And then there are consumers themselves, who have shown little interest in changing their eating habits, even as meat’s contribution to emissions has received more attention.
“The reality is that Americans eat as much meat now as they did 50 years ago,” said Maureen Ogle, historian and author of In Meat We Trust, a history of the meat industry in America.
Ogle said American producers have vigorously rejected over the years anything that threatened their market, from a proposal to include “meatless Mondays” in national dietary guidelines to research reports highlighting the health dangers of eating too much red meat.
The Guardian and DeSmog reported last month that the meat industry was planning a large presence at COP28, to spread the message that meat is good for the environment. Media outlets cited documents produced by the Global Meat Alliance, an industry-funded group, which they said included messages such as that grazing livestock can help maintain healthy soils and meat can help in food-insecure countries.
The alliance told The Guardian that its work “includes visibility of intergovernmental events that are often dominated by an anti-meat narrative.” In a statement emailed to the AP, the group said it applauds the focus on food and agriculture in global agendas like COP28.
“We welcome clear rules or standards to reduce agricultural emissions at this time, and the industry is prepared to support these efforts while maintaining a place in the value chain,” the statement said.
Many governments around the world have long promoted meat, transforming cultural meat-eating habits, said Wilson Warren, a history professor at Western Michigan University. That has turned meat into an industry driven by multinational corporations worth billions of dollars. In the United States, subsidies pay farmers to overproduce so meat can be sold cheaper to urban people, Ogle said.
In both the United States and the European Union, animal agriculture receives far more public financial support and lobbying attention than meat alternatives, a Stanford University study found this summer. That’s a problem because better options are needed for consumers, said one of the co-authors, Simona Vallone, a researcher now working at Sustainable San Mateo County.
“We are in this delicate moment in which we need to make decisions at the government level and also at the global level,” Vallone said. If the goal is to curb emissions quickly, he added, “we don’t have much time to change our system.”
Food systems were the focus of some protesters. Lei Chu, a vegan activist, said it is important for people to consider how what they eat matters to the world.
“If this action is killing our Earth, we have to change it,” he said.
Jason Weller, global director of sustainability at Brazil-based JBS, one of the world’s largest meat producers, said “the myopic focus on reducing meat consumption does not reflect reality or science.” Citing the FAO report, he said improvements in productivity have the greatest influence on reducing emissions.
When asked if people in countries like the United States need to reduce their meat consumption to stay within agreed-upon warming limits, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack went on to discuss nutritional safety, product labeling and consumer education, which he said would help consumers “make the market.” decisions that will accelerate and drive change.”
Experts said it is more realistic for people in richer countries to eat a little less red meat rather than for everyone to give up meat altogether. “It’s pretty dramatic the intensity of emissions in the United States from beef versus non-ruminants, pork and poultry,” said Tom Hertel, distinguished professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University.
At a side event at COP28, Lawrence Haddad of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition agreed. He said that “people in the global north cannot lecture people in the global south about eating less meat.”
Meanwhile, organizations like the FAO and private companies say making the existing system even more efficient may be part of the solution. The FAO report includes sections on improving animals through selective breeding and adapting animal nutrition to reduce their methane emissions. Ruminants like cows emit methane due to the functioning of their digestive system, but changing their diet can help to some extent.
The declaration on agriculture signed by world leaders at the start of COP28 is a vague promise, not a binding agreement. Leaders “must champion change within formal climate negotiations,” said Ruth Davis, a former adviser to the British government’s COP26 team on food and nature.
Policymakers should focus on improving enforcement of potentially misleading sustainability claims and also better incentivizing farmers to implement truly green practices, said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group.
He said, “Wouldn’t it be better if big meat producers worked with groups like EWG to make sure those scarce USDA conservation dollars actually go toward practices that change how we feed animals, how we manage their waste, how How do we manage their movements, how do we fertilize their food?
But as much as businesses and governments play a role, Purdue’s Hertel agreed with Ogle that consumers are at the heart of the system.
“For a lot of people it probably reduces the cost,” Hertel said of choosing traditional meat at the supermarket. If meat alternatives were much cheaper and tasted more or less the same, “I think you’d see more movement in that direction,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Joshua Bickel contributed to this report from Dubai.
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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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Follow Melina Walling on X: @MelinaWalling.
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