Monbiot: “I Was Wrong About Veganism”
September 7th, 2010Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie
Via: Guardian:
This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.
In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world’s livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism “is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue”. I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I’m about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.
In Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie pays handsome tribute to vegans for opening up the debate. He then subjects their case to the first treatment I’ve read that is both objective and forensic. His book is an abattoir for misleading claims and dodgy figures, on both sides of the argument.
There’s no doubt that the livestock system has gone horribly wrong. Fairlie describes the feedlot beef industry (in which animals are kept in pens) in the US as “one of the biggest ecological cock-ups in modern history”. It pumps grain and forage from irrigated pastures into the farm animal species least able to process them efficiently, to produce beef fatty enough for hamburger production. Cattle are excellent converters of grass but terrible converters of concentrated feed. The feed would have been much better used to make pork.
Pigs, in the meantime, have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat. Until the early 1990s, only 33% of compound pig feed in the UK consisted of grains fit for human consumption: the rest was made up of crop residues and food waste. Since then the proportion of sound grain in pig feed has doubled. There are several reasons: the rules set by supermarkets; the domination of the feed industry by large corporations, which can’t handle waste from many different sources; but most important the panicked over-reaction to the BSE and foot-and-mouth crises.
Feeding meat and bone meal to cows was insane. Feeding it to pigs, whose natural diet incorporates a fair bit of meat, makes sense, as long as it is rendered properly. The same goes for swill. Giving sterilised scraps to pigs solves two problems at once: waste disposal and the diversion of grain. Instead we now dump or incinerate millions of tonnes of possible pig food and replace it with soya whose production trashes the Amazon. Waste food in the UK, Fairlie calculates, could make 800,000 tonnes of pork, or one sixth of our total meat consumption.
But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we’ve been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.
If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don’t compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it’s a significant net gain.
It’s the second half – the stuffing of animals with grain to boost meat and milk consumption, mostly in the rich world – which reduces the total food supply. Cut this portion out and you would create an increase in available food which could support 1.3 billion people. Fairlie argues we could afford to use a small amount of grain for feeding livestock, allowing animals to mop up grain surpluses in good years and slaughtering them in lean ones. This would allow us to consume a bit more than half the world’s current volume of animal products, which means a good deal less than in the average western diet.
He goes on to butcher a herd of sacred cows. Like many greens I have thoughtlessly repeated the claim that it requires 100,000 litres of water to produce every kilogram of beef. Fairlie shows that this figure is wrong by around three orders of magnitude. It arose from the absurd assumption that every drop of water that falls on a pasture disappears into the animals that graze it, never to re-emerge. A ridiculous amount of fossil water is used to feed cattle on irrigated crops in California, but this is a stark exception.
Similarly daft assumptions underlie the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, a higher proportion than transport. Fairlie shows that it made a number of basic mistakes. It attributes all deforestation that culminates in cattle ranching in the Amazon to cattle: in reality it is mostly driven by land speculation and logging. It muddles up one-off emissions from deforestation with ongoing pollution. It makes similar boobs in its nitrous oxide and methane accounts, confusing gross and net production. (Conversely, the organisation greatly underestimates fossil fuel consumption by intensive farming: its report seems to have been informed by a powerful bias against extensive livestock keeping.)
Overall, Fairlie estimates that farmed animals produce about 10% of the world’s emissions: still too much, but a good deal less than transport. He also shows that many vegetable oils have a bigger footprint than animal fats, and reminds us that even vegan farming necessitates the large-scale killing or ecological exclusion of animals: in this case pests. On the other hand, he slaughters the claims made by some livestock farmers about the soil carbon they can lock away.
The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It’s time we got stuck in.
Wow, a surprising bit of common sense from Moonbat, though he is only reviewing someone else’s work.
Although I am neither a eugenicist nor a proponent of mandatory birth control/population control I have often argued that if meat production was a less efficient way to feed people per acre of land, then we may want to consider promoting it, as it will then tend to limit the size of the human population by peacefully limiting the maximum level of food production.
Population levels (everywhere but the first world) follow food supply like night follows day…
This new analysis may however weaken my hypothesis and I may have to come up with a whole new set of self-serving justifications for my carnivorous behavior.
***Sigh***
“as it will then tend to limit the size of the human population by peacefully limiting the maximum level of food production. ”
I have to disagree here. If the population starve, people won’t think about stoping having childrens, they will think about fighting for food. I see more food shortages as a violence catalyzer. Unless bird control is assured by the governement but that’s another story.
@ Zenc
“Population levels (everywhere but the first world) follow food supply like night follows day”
Could you lead us to the data ?
A priori, I’d say there’s a link with this :
“On average, 62 million people die each year, of whom probably 36 million (58 per cent) directly or indirectly as a result of nutritional deficiencies, infections, epidemics or diseases which attack the body when its resistance and immunity have been weakened by undernourishment and hunger.”
From :
http://graduateinstitute.ch/faculty/clapham/hrdoc/docs/foodrep2001.pdf
Oh, thats why the EU modified swiss farming law. We had a system that collected surplus food, swills and farming wastes for pigs. Now that the EU forbid that, we had to stop that too. We could continue, but then almost every food export would cease.
As I constantly repeat: our little country has little farms and the possibility to produce meat in steep landscapes. Its the only mode we can collect the energy of the sun in mountainous regions. Blubbering against all kinds of meat the same time despite having a net gain for everybody (think of the tourism too) is silly and distracts the public from real issues like mentioned in the article.
On the water used by farming: It is true that beef consumes a lot of water – if the nutrition comes from outside the system. If “the shit goes back onto the pasture” and the cattle eats mostly grass, there is no possibility of polluting streams and flowing waters on this large scale we do it today.
Monbiot should have read Against the Grain by Richard Manning, too.
@Zenc: quite disappointing comments. really lacking any kind of insight at all. the “let them eat cake” take on post-agriculture human history? oh well.
@rotger
I agree with you that hungry people are worried about eating, not birth control, and that food shortages can certainly catalyze violence. The readily understood term “food riot” provides clear evidence of your point.
What I was intending to convey however, was that the problem of food production is something of a “chicken and egg” problem. Limiting food production to a certain level will limit the population to a commensurate level. There are a number of processes – biological, sociological, ecological, (some known and surely some as yet unknown) which work to down-regulate birthrates in the face of food scarcity.
Limiting the level of food production by using a less efficient (and less destructive) method of agriculture is to me more peaceful than limiting it by prohibitions against agriculture backed up by squads of armed thugs (military, gendarme, state security forces, etc)and is arguably preferable to mandatory birth control schemes.
You can point to the land and say “Look, we’re raising cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, whatever.” and that tends to defuse and diffuse a sharp sense of social injustice based on food production (food distribution and allocation is an entirely separate matter).
@soothing hex
Your request was actually more difficult than I imagined it would be, simply because I came to the statement “Population levels (everywhere but the first world) follow food supply like night follows day” based on my own general education in biology, ecology, and hunters education/certification courses along with the data which shows that developed nations like Germany, Japan, the US, etc show stable or declining birthrates among their native populations (recent immigrants tend to behave differently based on their culture of origin).
That is, there was no single study or article I had read which led me to that conclusion.
However, I did find a scholarly study which seems to support what I’m saying here :http://www.bioinfo.rpi.edu/bystrc/pub/pimentel.pdf
Further complicating the matter, much of the information I came across in the search for some cogent supporting evidence was espoused by groups which I would consider to be rather radical environmental activist groups, whose data I am generally suspicious of. Not wishing to rely on that, I kept looking til I found the above article which can be properly vetted as it includes a list of references.
I hope that it is helpful to you or that at least its bibliography is useful.
Additionally, I’d like to point out that the quote you provided from the WHO document you linked is an example of one or several of the processes whereby birthrates are moderated in the face of food scarcity, which is undoubtedly why you provided it. Excellent insight.
As a final note to my comments, I want to point out that I am very uncomfortable with the advocacy (or even to some degree the mere discussion) of policies which could lead to deprivation or hunger of people or the manipulation of their moral/ethical values which would alter their liklihood of bearing children. It is a very delicate subject and it’s frighteningly easy to end up supporting monstrous cruelty and suffering.
@ Zenc
Thanks for the research&link.
I think I kinda get your point. An increase in food production could mean lower prices ((and less retribution for small-scale farmers)). Implying a possible increase in the availability of food for the poorest, but also for the general population. Hence an effect on population demographics (history has some documentation on this).
What if you get people to grow their own food ?
“hungry people don’t stay hungry for long, they get hope from fire and smoke as the wheat grows strong” – RATM
@soothing hex
You illuminate a subtle but important point; increased food production may be disproportionately distributed in a way which doesn’t really help “the poor” or people who are somewhere on the boundary of starvation.
For example, according to standard economic principles, while increased food production should tend to lower the price of the food itself there may be no change in the cost of distribution and distribution may comprise the majority of the cost in some situations.
Getting people to raise their own food may well be a way to get food to the people who most need it and can least afford it. In fact, it may be the best way, or even the only reliable way to address the starvation problem among certain groups.
However, that returns us to the problem of whether or not that increase in food supply will be large enough to inspire a birthrate higher than what’s needed for strict replacement and to my purely hypothetical speculation that the less efficient/productive “livestock farming” methods might in some cases keep people from crossing that threshold.
i don’t want to sound arrogant or repetitive, but i think you are both being very naive with regards to food production and agriculture in general.
once more, i urge you to read Against the Grain by Richard Manning. it will almost certainly go some way toward enhancing your understanding of the “food problem”.