by On his website he promotes a variety of CBD products and encourages people to follow the paleo diet, a meat-centric nutritional plan that became popular in the United States in the early 2010s.
Comparing the carbon footprint of plant-based products to that of cattle raised for human consumption is misleading, experts told AFP.
“Meat fed on soy or corn is inefficient compared to eating protein crops directly,” said Delphine Deryng, visiting researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and lead author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chapter on food products (archived here).
AFP has investigated claims about it cattle effect on greenhouse gas emissions. Research shows that most of the methane produced by humans is the result of enteric fermentation from livestock (archived here and here).
Land and water use
Meat production, especially beef, requires much more water than meat production plants.
“big monoculture corn or soybeans are not particularly great for biodiversity, but if their harvest is used to produce meat alternatives rather than feed livestock, the overall environmental footprint is much smaller,” said Jonas Jägermeyr, climate change scientist and a top model at Columbia University ( archived here ), on March 5.
“It takes a lot more land and water to feed crops to livestock than to eat it to produce the same amount of food.”
Hanna Tuomisto, professor of sustainable food systems at the Helsinki Sustainability Institute Science (archived here), United.
about “80 percent of agricultural land is used for livestock production worldwide, but livestock products provide less than 18 percent of food energy and less than 40 percent of protein,” she said March 14. A 2018 research paper published similar data (archived here).
David Tilman, the an ecologist at the University of Minnesota (archived here), AFP said on March 6 that “the assertion that massive soy and wheat farms are needed to produce foods that are alternatives to beef, pork and chicken is wrong in several ways.”
Tilman pointed out that one kilogram of edible animal protein requires 3-10 kilograms of plant protein depending on the livestock (archived here), as well as more land use.
Emissions
So with increasing demand (archived here) for animal-based food products — linked primarily to global population growth and improved living standards around the world — there are concerns about continued high emissions trends from agriculture unless dietary changes.
The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that although methane emissions fell nationally between 1990 and 2021those from agricultural sources — especially enteric fermentation from cattle — increased during the same period (archived here and here).
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Studies have predicted that global emissions will drop significantly if consumers adopt plant-based diets within the next few years twenty years (archived here and here).
In United States alone — where meat consumption is more than three times the world average per capita — could change dietary habits more effect on emissions than elsewhere, according to a 2018 case study (archived here).
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Scientists say cutting emissions is key to limiting the rise in global average temperatures and the worst effects of climate change change (archived here).
“Eating less meat helps preserve the biodiversity of the tropics and allows grasslands, grasslands and some croplands to be restored into natural ecosystems that support wildlife,” Tilman said.
Monocrobe and biodiversity
Andres Agudelo-Suárez, a lecturer at Universidad de la Costa in Colombia and a researcher on sustainable food systems (archived here), told AFP that large-scale monoculture production mainly affects biodiversity (archived here).
“All activities based on industrial and large-scale exploitation that produce different ecological and social trade-offs,” he said March 8. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s cattle or flowers, wheat or soybeans.”
Ecologist Camille Parmesan (archived here) agreed.
“There is a real conflict between food production and the protection of biodiversity, regardless of the type of food being cultivated – both animals and plants are harmful to biodiversity,” she said on 10 March.
But Parmesan, who researches the effects of global climate change on biodiversity, told AFP that the damage caused by agriculture “can be greatly reduced by changing the way we make food,” noting that the Instagram post Ruh ignores the complexity of food systems.
“There are a wide range of approaches that, if implemented on a global scale, would go a long way towards maximizing food production and minimizing biodiversity loss,” she said, pointing to better crop management and more produce eat local.
“Some land is better for animal production than for plant production, and vice-vice versa.”
AFP has debunked other claims about human effects on global warming here.
