Earthling Liberation notes

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The food system plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change. Even if fossil fuel emissions are halted immediately, current trends in global food systems may prevent the achieving of the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. The high degree of variability and uncertainty involved in calculating diet-related greenhouse gas emissions limits the ability to evaluate reduction potentials to remain below a global warming of 1.5 or 2 degrees. This study assessed Western European dietary patterns while accounting for uncertainty and variability. An extensive literature review provided value ranges for climate impacts of animal-based foods to conduct an uncertainty analysis via Monte Carlo simulation. The resulting carbon footprints were assessed against food system-specific greenhouse gas emission thresholds. The range and absolute value of a diet carbon footprint become larger the higher the amount of products with highly varying emission values in the diet. All dietary pattern carbon footprints overshoot the 1.5 degrees threshold. The vegan, vegetarian, and diet with low animal-based food intake were predominantly below the 2 degrees threshold. Omnivorous diets with more animal-based product content trespassed them. Reducing animal-based foods is a powerful strategy to decrease emissions. However, further mitigation strategies are required to achieve climate goals.

The November Revolution was swift because Germans had been starving for years thanks to the British blockade, as recent historical work has finally proven. But the success of the blockade depended upon German mismanagement. As a populous nation with an economy driven by industry rather than agriculture, Germany had been a major importer of foodstuffs and fertilizer before the war; it faced extreme shortages once fighting broke out. Yet, as detailed in economic historian Avner Offer’s study The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1991), it could have achieved agricultural self-sufficiency had it abandoned animal husbandry. Dairy and meat production were extremely inefficient, then as now. As a visiting U.S. physiologist wrote in 1916: “Had the Germans been vegetarians, there would have been no problem. To the people of India, the ratio of grain to population would have constituted luxury. For people accustomed to eating a great deal of meat and animal products, the natural impulse was to cling as closely as possible to established habits.”

Infectious diseases originating from animals (zoonotic diseases) have emerged following deforestation from agriculture. Agriculture can reduce its land use through intensification, i.e., improving resource use efficiency. However, intensive management often confines animals and their wastes, which also fosters disease emergence. Therefore, rising demand for animal-sourced foods creates a “trap” of zoonotic disease risks: extensive land use on one hand or intensive animal management on the other. Not all intensification poses disease risks; some methods avoid confinement and improve animal health. However, these “win-win” improvements alone cannot satisfy rising meat demand, particularly for chicken and pork. Intensive poultry and pig production entails greater antibiotic use, confinement, and animal populations than beef production. Shifting from beef to chicken consumption mitigates climate emissions, but this common strategy neglects zoonotic disease risks. Preventing zoonotic diseases requires international coordination to reduce the high demand for animal-sourced foods, improve forest conservation governance, and selectively intensify the lowest-producing ruminant animal systems without confinement.

Strategies that prevent infectious diseases at their root sources are called primary prevention (6, 18, 33). This work outlines three pillars for primary prevention that, when combined, constitute stronger protection against zoonotic diseases from animal agriculture than any one pillar in isolation (Fig 2). National governments should coordinate their support for a wide range of policies and activities that support these pillars, including expanding veterinary and extension services for improved animal care in LMICs (18), phasing out and banning subtherapeutic and growth-promoting antibiotic uses (82), forming multilateral commitments among countries importing and exporting tropical commodities linked to deforestation (73), ambitiously scaling community-based approaches to popularizing plant-rich diets (68), supporting open and public alternative protein research (77), and facilitating sustainable and just transitions for producers. Commitments should also set quantifiable science-based goals and fund ongoing research to monitor and accelerate progress. Together, the three pillars of primary prevention can guide and empower decision-makers to escape the zoonotic disease trap of business-as-usual animal agriculture.

Feeding humanity puts enormous environmental pressure on our planet. These pressures are unequally distributed, yet we have piecemeal knowledge of how they accumulate across marine, freshwater and terrestrial systems. Here we present global geospatial analyses detailing greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, habitat disturbance and nutrient pollution generated by 99% of total reported production of aquatic and terrestrial foods in 2017. We further rescale and combine these four pressures to map the estimated cumulative pressure, or ‘footprint’, of food production. On land, we find five countries contribute nearly half of food’s cumulative footprint. Aquatic systems produce only 1.1% of food but 9.9% of the global footprint. Which pressures drive these footprints vary substantially by food and country. Importantly, the cumulative pressure per unit of food production (efficiency) varies spatially for each food type such that rankings of foods by efficiency differ sharply among countries. These disparities provide the foundation for efforts to steer consumption towards lower-impact foods and ultimately the system-wide restructuring essential for sustainably feeding humanity.

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/193443/1/Halpern_etal_with_figures.pdf

Extended Data Fig. 3 Proportion of total global cumulative pressure for crops, broken down by pressure (components of each bar).

Richter, B.D., Bartak, D., Caldwell, P. et al. Water scarcity and fish imperilment driven by beef production. Nat Sustain 3, 319–328 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0483-z

Human consumption of freshwater is now approaching or surpassing the rate at which water sources are being naturally replenished in many regions, creating water shortage risks for people and ecosystems. Here we assess the impact of human water uses and their connection to water scarcity and ecological damage across the United States, identify primary causes of river dewatering and explore ways to ameliorate them. We find irrigation of cattle-feed crops to be the greatest consumer of river water in the western United States, implicating beef and dairy consumption as the leading driver of water shortages and fish imperilment in the region. We assess opportunities for alleviating water scarcity by reducing cattle-feed production, finding that temporary, rotational fallowing of irrigated feed crops can markedly reduce water shortage risks and improve ecological sustainability. Long-term water security and river ecosystem health will ultimately require Americans to consume less beef that depends on irrigated feed crops.

• Forage competition. Most forage on public lands is consumed by livestock, leaving little residual cover or food for native wildlife.
• Livestock compact and trample soils reduce infiltration, creating higher run-off, flooding, and erosion.
• Livestock is the West’s primary source of non-point water pollution non-point water pollution in the West.
• Livestock destroys soil crusts that bind the soil and capture free nitrogen, making it available for plant growth. Soil crust also inhibits weed establishment.
• Livestock are among the chief sources of weed dispersal. Also, the trampling of plants and cropping of desirable plants gives weedy species a competitive advantage.
• Most of the West’s water is diverted for livestock forage production (i.e., hay). In Montana, for instance, 97% of all water is used by agriculture—chiefly to produce hay and alfalfa.
• Livestock can socially displace native species like elk, deer, antelope, and other species that have been shown to avoid areas actively being grazed by domestic animals.
• Livestock transmits disease to native species, i.e., bighorn sheep.
• Predator and “pests” control, such as killing wolves and prairie dogs, significantly reduces the ecological integrity of the landscape.
• Trampling of riparian areas negatively affects 75-80% of the West’s species that are riparian dependent.
• Plant community conversion—grazing can lead to the eventual transformation of a place community—for instance, many areas are dominated by cheatgrass.
• Livestock grazing contributes to increased fire severity because of the spread of the highly flammable cheatgrass.
• Livestock grazing can interrupt nutrient cycles.
• Livestock degrades the esthetics of the landscape—for instance, cow manure in many recreation areas like campgrounds.
• Forage production on and off public lands destroys native plant communities. More than 80% of all US cropland, or approximately 300 million acres (three times the acreage of California), is devoted to livestock forage (corn, soy, hay) production, which has eliminated the natural communities.
• Livestock affects many smaller native species that are seldom on the radar screen of most citizens, from snails to frogs to grasshoppers.
• Livestock production is responsible for more Endangered Species than any other land use in the West.
• Fences, water developments, and other structures used to maintain livestock operations negatively impact native species. I.e., fences block wildlife migrations, and fence posts may provide perches for birds of pretty to attack sage grouse. In addition, water developments used by livestock act as predator pits, attracting wildlife to water with little hiding cover making prey species vulnerable to predators.
• Getting to the actual costs of livestock production is nearly impossible. The accurate price is uncountable. Even the public taxpayer subsidies are obscured by false and tricky accounting. If you fence a campground to keep cows out, it comes from the recreation budget, not the livestock budget. If you fence a spring to protect the water source, the cost is usually charged to the wildlife accounts.
• Livestock is one of the major contributors to GHG emissions globally.
• Public lands provide less than 4% of the forage consumed by livestock in the country yet have an overwhelmingly negative impact on the West’s ecological integrity. Eliminating livestock grazing is the most effective way to restore and heal the land.

The Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the increase in global temperature to 1.5° or 2°C above preindustrial levels requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Although reducing emissions from fossil fuels is essential for meeting this goal, other sources of emissions may also preclude its attainment. We show that even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, current trends in global food systems would prevent the achievement of the 1.5°C target and, by the end of the century, threaten the achievement of the 2°C target. Meeting the 1.5°C target requires rapid and ambitious changes to food systems as well as to all nonfood sectors. The 2°C target could be achieved with less-ambitious changes to food systems, but only if fossil fuel and other nonfood emissions are eliminated soon.

We conclude that although a diet with lower rates of animal product consumption is likely to create the greatest reduction in agricultural land, a mix of smaller changes in consumer behaviour, such as replacing beef with chicken, reducing food waste and potentially introducing insects more commonly into diets, would also achieve land savings and a more sustainable food system.

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Spatially, the shift in the harvested area from food and feed towards processing in the United States is reflective of the evolving role of the country in global crop production and renewable energy targets25. Similar but less dramatic changes have occurred in Europe. The changes observed in Latin America from a region oriented to food production, to harvesting feed and processing crops, have been observed since the late 1990s with the expansion of maize and soybean harvests pushed by commodity prices and exchange rate26 and at the cost of tropical ecosystems27,28,29,30. China’s movement away from harvesting crops for direct food utilization to processing and feed crops has been mainly driven by the changes in its consumption structure due to rising incomes and population where people demand high-value food products31. The country can substantially improve its domestic soybean (and other crops) production by optimizing the spatial distribution (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2) and thus reducing pressure on domestic and foreign environmental resources. Similarly, in India, demand for processed food has increased due to demographic changes and health consciousness, increased demand for branded and convenient items, modernization of retail and food service sectors and heightened efforts to develop food manufacturing by the government31.

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We recommend that food-insecure nations, non-governmental organizations and other aid groups immediately incentivize harvests and yield growth of directly consumed food crops. To close any gap in nourishment in food-insecure nations that cannot be locally met, highly productive world regions should also be incentivized to divert a portion of their production towards directly consumed food crops. Such changes should prioritize equitable access for the food undernourished and ensure justice for farmers and agriculture-sector livelihoods and should be substantively discussed during policymaking.

More grifting from the herder sector

Summary

Background

Adoption of healthy and sustainable diets could be essential for safe-guarding the Earth's natural resources and reducing diet-related mortality, but their adoption could be hampered if such diets proved to be more expensive and unaffordable for some populations. Therefore, we aimed to estimate the costs of healthy and sustainable diets around the world.

Methods

In this modelling study, we used regionally comparable food prices from the International Comparison Program for 150 countries. We paired those prices with estimates of food demand for different dietary patterns that, in modelling studies, have been associated with reductions in premature mortality and environmental resource demand, including nutritionally balanced flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan diets. We used estimates of food waste and projections of food demand and prices to specify food system and socioeconomic change scenarios up to 2050. In the full cost accounting, we estimated diet-related health-care costs by pairing a comparative risk assessment of dietary risks with cost-of-illness estimates, and we estimated climate change costs by pairing the diet scenarios with greenhouse gas emission footprints and estimates of the social cost of carbon.

Findings

Compared with the cost of current diets, the healthy and sustainable dietary patterns were, depending on the pattern, up to 22–34% lower in cost in upper-middle-income to high-income countries on average (when considering statistical means), but at least 18–29% more expensive in lower-middle-income to low-income countries. Reductions in food waste, a favourable socioeconomic development scenario, and a fuller cost accounting that included the diet-related costs of climate change and health care in the cost of diets increased the affordability of the dietary patterns in our future projections. When these measures were combined, the healthy and sustainable dietary patterns were up to 25–29% lower in cost in low-income to lower-middle-income countries, and up to 37% lower in cost on average, for the year 2050. Variants of vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns were generally most affordable, and pescatarian diets were least affordable.

Interpretation

In high-income and upper-middle-income countries, dietary change interventions that incentivise adoption of healthy and sustainable diets can help consumers in those countries reduce costs while, at the same time, contribute to fulfilling national climate change commitments and reduce public health spending. In low-income and lower-middle-income countries, healthy and sustainable diets are substantially less costly than western diets and can also be cost-competitive in the medium-to-long term, subject to beneficial socioeconomic development and reductions in food waste. A fuller accounting of the costs of diets would make healthy and sustainable diets the least costly option in most countries in the future.

(2017 ) Global agricultural feeds over 7 billion people, but is also a leading cause of environmental degradation. Understanding how alternative agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice drive environmental degradation is necessary for reducing agriculture's environmental impacts. A meta-analysis of life cycle assessments that includes 742 agricultural systems and over 90 unique foods produced primarily in high-input systems shows that, per unit of food, organic systems require more land, cause more eutrophication, use less energy, but emit similar greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) as conventional systems; that grass-fed beef requires more land and emits similar GHG emissions as grain-feed beef; and that low-input aquaculture and non-trawling fisheries have much lower GHG emissions than trawling fisheries. In addition, our analyses show that increasing agricultural input efficiency (the amount of food produced per input of fertilizer or feed) would have environmental benefits for both crop and livestock systems. Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts; eggs, dairy, pork, poultry, non-trawling fisheries, and non-recirculating aquaculture have intermediate impacts; and ruminant meat has impacts ∼100 times those of plant-based foods. Our analyses show that dietary shifts towards low-impact foods and increases in agricultural input use efficiency would offer larger environmental benefits than would switches from conventional agricultural systems to alternatives such as organic agriculture or grass-fed beef.

Food loss is widely recognized as undermining food security and environmental sustainability. However, consumption of resource-intensive food items instead of more efficient, equally nutritious alternatives can also be considered as an effective food loss. Here we define and quantify these opportunity food losses as the food loss associated with consuming resource-intensive animal-based items instead of plant-based alternatives which are nutritionally comparable, e.g., in terms of protein content. We consider replacements that minimize cropland use for each of the main US animal-based food categories. We find that although the characteristic conventional retail-to-consumer food losses are ≈30% for plant and animal products, the opportunity food losses of beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs are 96%, 90%, 75%, 50%, and 40%, respectively. This arises because plant-based replacement diets can produce 20-fold and twofold more nutritionally similar food per cropland than beef and eggs, the most and least resource-intensive animal categories, respectively. Although conventional and opportunity food losses are both targets for improvement, the high opportunity food losses highlight the large potential savings beyond conventionally defined food losses. Concurrently replacing all animal-based items in the US diet with plant-based alternatives will add enough food to feed, in full, 350 million additional people, well above the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food waste. These results highlight the importance of dietary shifts to improving food availability and security.

possibly readable with this link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00431-5.epdf?sharing_token=Uy1qkqxSXRCFFxqXMC-juNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N2FyxYfUZnImV-FtBguc_Z3evcJzAo3FJKL2SiZ5fsD1sXAZT9UfcnDkoDcnB_-S0BM16kgeEgNim5Zqod_BU8BChZEHPhOFOLojiolJmT1ek4e-Ai14a7kMqyT983zMQ%3D

The book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/916-the-imperial-mode-of-living

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