Farmers Need To Focus On What Goes In As Well As What Comes Out

As the world’s population heads towards nine billion people, it is crucial that the global agriculture sector is able to meet the increased demand for food. But the world’s food production industry is on an unsustainable path – one that mirrors the unsustainable short-termism of the financial sector in recent years – and needs to change radically if it is to feed the world of the future as well as the world of today.  While demand for meat is growing as prosperity in emerging markets creates a burgeoning middle class hungry for the good things in life, a group of scientists called, in a recent article in the journal Nature Climate Change, for a tax on meat to encourage people to eat less of it because of its damaging effects on the environment. Such demands are only likely to grow. Emissions from cattle, sheep and goats are the single biggest source of human-related methane – a gas that persists in the atmosphere for a shorter period than carbon dioxide, but which is 23 times as powerful in its global warming effects. Meat production also consumes a huge amount of water – it takes 15,415 litres to produce 1kg of beef, according to the UK’s Institute of Mechanical Engineers, which is just one reason that the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says: “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” Farming is one of the main causes of land clearance and deforestation, a huge contributor to climate change, while overuse of fertiliser causes eutrophication – too many nutrients in water that reduce the amount of oxygen available for marine life and reduce water quality – as well as dead zones in coastal areas and degradation of coral reefs... more