I would have expected this to be proof-read, as it is a direct excerpt taken from a book, but it is filled with mistakes. Spelling, grammar, word order...
Maybe it is an excerpt of the first manuscript of the book.
Other than that, I find the concept very interesting, but quite intuitive too.
Unfortunately I had no luck finding the actual OECD reports, though (aside from the "
Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2019" report, but that seems to just compare each country to the global average, rather than talking about different types of subsidies)
"[...] animal products and feed", straight from the image. Sadly, no distinction. I would assume that it's mostly subsidies to feed. I am unable to find any sources on subsidies to meat directly.
I'm all for removing subsidies to monoculture agriculture.
> I am unable to find any sources on subsidies to meat directly.
Yeah, I searched around a bit (even outside of the US) and I'm having difficulty finding any proper data to back up or refute it. That's a pity, would have been nice to know either way. The best I found was data on subsidies given to individual farmers in my country (I'm not in the US), but unless I scrape the site and aggregate and categorise the data, its not really useful (and doing that is too much work for me).
> I'm all for removing subsidies to monoculture agriculture.
Absolutely. I don't even mind animal products receiving subsidies, I'm not vegetarian and certainly not vegan, but I do hope that non-animal products get a large chunk of the subsidy pie, personally.
Sure, I'm in favour of moving subsidies away from these too. Corn is largely used for animal feed (and also unhealthy stuff like HFCS) and the modern diet is much too overloaded on corn, wheat and soy and its making us unhealthy. Wheat or wheat derivatives are also added as a filler to many foods, which, as someone who has family members who have celiac disease, is pretty frustrating. There are plenty of non-animal products that it might make sense to encourage. As I said, I'm not against subsidising animal products, but I suggested reducing it because the UN said we should eat less meat.
How about we don't change the diet but change where the food comes from?
When talking about meat and damage to the environment, the only relevant figures are the ones associated with animal feed (e.g. water consumption per kg of meat).
Pastured animals, by definition, don't eat feed coming from the monoculture industrial agriculture that is depleting the soil and consuming all those resources, and which is also used to feed humans, sadly.
No matter what you feed them, compared to other livestock animals cows are a fairly inefficient at turning feed into meat, meaning you need to dedicate more land to agriculture when it could be forest instead and thus a better carbon sink.
> meaning you need to dedicate more land to agriculture
I don't understand why most people have this wrong idea. In a lot of places, the grazing pastures are naturally occurring, they aren't planted there.
It feels like people want to destroy the natural landscape of countries like Argentina, just because it's now fashionable to say they don't eat meat.
Even goats, everyone goes around claiming they have such an ineficient CO2/Kg meat index. Well, around here, goats are fed almost all the year by going into the forest and cleaning the shrubs and small vegetation there... besides feeding the goats for free, it also cleans the forest for free: something we would have to do otherwise in order to prevent fires in the summer.
> There are, as far as I know, regions where the soil is only capable of growing pasture, hard to plant trees in.
I assume that those areas would not be sufficient to cover current meat and dairy demands. If they were there wouldn't be any deforestation or soy fields for animal feed. And non-grazed grasslands is still going to release less methane than grazed lands.
More than 90% of a beef cow's body weight comes from pasture land grass and hay.
When's the last time the Midwestern plains area of the United States was forest? Before the beef industry, 50-100 million bison roamed the plains. It turns out that ruminants like bison and cows are essential components of a grassland ecosystem.
Yes it is. They are prey animals and they literally evolved to be prey. Incidentally we also killed off most of the major predators around the world so there are few wolves, saber tooth cats, etc to keep population numbers controlled.
Regarding deforestation and so on, I think we must also take into account that "industrialized" non-pastured husbandry (is that the correct term?) is probably cheaper and easier than the greener alternative.
Sadly, it's usually a matter of profits and not a matter of environmental friendliness.
You can't produce as much meat from pastured animals as with industrial techniques. If humanity went all-pastured, meat prices would go up, many wouldn't be able to afford as much meat as now, and we would have changed the average person's diet.
This would also create incentives to cut down forests to create more "pasture", and that would be pretty terrible.
> When talking about meat and damage to the environment, the only relevant figures are associated with animal feed (e.g. water consumption per kg of meat).
Yes, you are right. I have conveyed my point only half-way and I apologize.
What I meant is that methane is known to have a bigger heating effect than other greenhouse gases, like x28 that of CO2 if I recall correctly. This is used as part of the anti-ruminant argument, when comparing the effect of methane expelled by animals to the rest of greenhouse gas emissions.
However, if you take into account the reduced lifespan, that 28-time increase is definitely less relevant.
> Methane in the Earth's atmosphere is a strong greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) 104 times greater than CO2 in a 20-year time frame; methane is not as persistent a gas as CO2 and tails off to about GWP of 28 for a 100-year time frame
And once you take positive feedbacks into account additional emissions can be problematic even within "short" timeframes.
Yeah, but the reason GMOs started was to improve yields for livestock-feed related plants and is the reason GMOs exist today (if we ignore cotton, which is GMO-ed primarily for the clothing). I'm pretty sure soybean is nutrient dense livestock feed, not just a carbohydrate source.
The only reason GMOs would exist for humans would be to improve the yields of most popular plants which are obviously not raised for nutrition but for taste. Almost every other plant in the world is produced in such minuscule amounts compared to soybean, wheat, maize and rice that there's no need for GMO.
I would say that enough land is spent on livestock feed that if we switched to meatless diets we would likely be able to feed everyone. There are regions only suited to food for livestock but most of the world imports food making it not an issue. The regions that don’t import food that tend to eat more meat from necessity are also likely to be the places that don’t contribute to overuse of land for livestock food.
