by More than 100 world leaders at this year’s United Nations climate summit agreed to make their farm and food systems a key part of their plans to fight climate change, seeking improvements in a sector that comprises about a third of ‘planetary warming emissions.
With livestock responsible for more than half of those emissions, meat and dairy are at the forefront of many agricultural conversations at COP28 in Dubai. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization contributed to those conversations with an updated report that included ways to reduce those livestock emissions.
“You don’t meet the climate targets without doing something in the system, and in this case on livestock,” said Francesco Tubiello, a senior statistician with the EBT who worked on the report. It briefly mentions eating less meat, but mostly highlights ways the meat industry can improve productivity and efficiency.
Change will not be easy. Like fossil fuel producers, the meat industry stepped up to defend their interests at the talks, including casting their practices as “sustainable nutrition,” according to one report. A potential competitor, another meat, has hit a rough patch after initial enthusiasm and investment.
And then there are consumers themselves, who have not shown much interest in changing their eating habits, even with more attention being paid to meat’s contribution to emissions.
“The reality is that Americans eat the same amount of meat now as they did 50 years ago,” said Maureen Ogle, historian and author of In Meat We Trust, a history of the American meat industry.
Ogle said American producers have pushed back vigorously over the years against anything that threatened their market — from a proposal to include “Meatless Monday” in national dietary guidelines to research reports that highlighted the health dangers of eating too much red meat.
The Guardian and DeSmog reported last month that the meat industry planned to have a big presence at COP28, to push the message that meat is good for the environment. The news outlets cited documents produced by the Global Meat Alliance, an industry-funded group, which they said contained messages such as grass-fed livestock can help maintain healthy soils and meat can help in food-insecure nations.
The alliance told the Guardian that its work includes “visibility of intergovernmental events which are often dominated by an anti-meat narrative.” In an emailed statement to AP, the group said it applauds the emphasis on food and agriculture at global agendas like COP28.
“We welcome clear rules or standards to reduce agricultural emissions at these times, and the industry is willing to support these efforts and maintain a place in the value chain,” the statement said.
Many governments around the world have promoted meat for a long time, changing cultural meat-eating habits, said Wilson Warren, a history professor at Western Michigan University. This has turned meat into an industry fueled by multinational corporations worth billions of dollars. In the United States, subsidies pay farmers to overproduce so that meat can be sold more cheaply to an urban population, Ogle said.
In both America and the European Union, animal farming receives far more public financial support and lobbying attention than meat alternatives, a Stanford University study found this summer. That’s a question because better consumer choices are needed, said one of the coauthors, Simona Vallone, now a researcher with Sustainable San Mateo County.
“We are at this delicate moment where we have to make decisions at the government level and at the global level as well,” Vallone said. If the goal is to reduce emissions quickly, she said, “we don’t have much time to change our system.”
Food systems were the focus of several exhibitors. Lei Chu, a vegan activist, said it is important for people to think about the importance of the world they eat.
“If this action is killing our world we need to change it,” she said.
Jason Weller, chief global sustainability officer at Brazil-based JBS, one of the world’s largest meat producers, said, “the myopic focus on reducing meat consumption reflects neither reality nor science.” Referring to the EBT report, he said that productivity improvements have the biggest impact on emissions reduction.
When asked whether people in countries like the US need to reduce their meat consumption to stay within agreed warming limits, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack took action to promote nutrition security, product labeling and consumer education. discussion, which he said would help consumers “make a deal. decisions that will accelerate and drive change.”
Experts said it is more realistic for people in wealthy countries to eat a little less red meat rather than asking everyone to give up meat altogether. “It’s quite dramatic, the intensity of beef emissions in the US compared to 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 from the global north cannot be lecturing people from the global south about eating less meat.”
Meanwhile, organizations such as the EBT and private companies say that part of the solution is to make the current system even more efficient. The EBT report includes sections on improving animals with selective breeding and adapting animal nutrition to reduce methane emissions. Ruminants like cows emit methane because of the way their digestive system works, but changing their diets a bit can help.
The agricultural declaration signed by world leaders at the start of COP28 is a loose commitment, not a binding agreement. Leaders need to “promote change within the 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, as well as better incentivizing farmers to implement truly green practices, said Scott Faber, senior vice president for 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 are actually going to the practices that change the way we feed animals, the how we manage their waste, how we do. manage their movements, how do we fertilize their lives?”
But as much as companies 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 comes down to cost,” Hertel said of choosing conventional meats at the grocery store. If meat alternatives were much cheaper and tasted the same, “I think you’d see more movement in that direction,” he said.
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Associated Press journalist Joshua Bickel contributed to this report from Dubai.
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Read more about 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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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage is supported by several private foundations. See more about the AP climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all matters.
