Are we moving towards a beef-free world? That certainly appears to be the direction in which the World Bank wants to go. A report published this week claims that food production generates almost a third of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions — more than heat and electricity. The Bank’s strategy is ambitious: to halve agricultural emissions by 2030, and reduce them to Net Zero by 2050.
Wealthy countries are urged to remove subsidy schemes such as the European Union’s Common Agriculture Policy, where over 70% of the budget subsidises livestock, and a third of all agricultural subsidy schemes support red meat and dairy production. These should be “repurposed”, the Bank argues, to instead support low-emission foods, such as poultry or fruits and vegetables. And more should be done to change consumption patterns using techniques such as “choice architecture strategies” — or nudging — or “education and communication campaigns” the World Bank advises.
However, industrial action by farmers across Europe, Latin America and Asia has returned food security to the news agenda after decades of complacency. These protests resonate strongly with the wider public. The “No Farmers, No Food” campaign, formed only this year, claims four times as many supporters as the National Farming Union has paying members. And while not all of the farmers are protesting environmental decrees, many of them are. In Wales, the Senedd has proposed the nation cuts livestock by 10.8%.
Critics may wonder if the Bank’s rhetoric is a little overheated. The authors’ sense of urgency seems almost frenzied — note the bizarre capitalisation of: “Positive Feedback Loops between Agrifood Activities and the Climate Have Created a Vicious Circle that Precludes Adaptation Alone as a Solution to the Crisis.”
Nor is a warming planet necessarily bad for our food supply. As the world warms, life flourishes. Even Nasa has acknowledged that we’re experiencing a “global greening”. As generations of children were taught at school, the cycle is virtuous: livestock fertilise and improve the quality of the land. While ruminants release methane through belching, this is a very short-lived greenhouse gas, at around 12 years. And for its part, the UK’s agricultural sector comprises only a small proportion of global carbon dioxide emissions, so shutting it down makes little difference to the climate, particularly as global meat consumption is expected to continue to rise.
Until recently, the World Bank encouraged poor countries to become richer through economic development. But today, having adopted Malthusian constraints — the World Bank writes of the planet’s “operating limits” — it encourages them to stay poor. The Bank’s report is keen that “low-emitting developing countries have the chance to go straight to green technologies, leading the way toward a new development model and healthier planet”. The burgeoning NGO sector, which purportedly exists to promote the interests of the “Global South”, sees no problem with this.
However, the biggest challenge facing the climate radicals at the World Bank is that we place such a high value on meat. Meat consumption rose during the pandemic lockdowns, as the roast became the centrepiece of family time. While inflation has seen red meat sales fall, recent polling by trade group AHDB strongly suggests consumers will return.
“Much of the world still suffers from undernutrition and exists on a very restricted range of foods,” the former director of Scientific Alliance, Martin Livermore, reminds us in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Recent years have seen venture capital fund alternative proteins, ranging from ersatz plant-based facsimiles of meat products to insect-derivatives to bioreactor-generated cells, the latter compared to “eating tumours”. These have all faced problems: either consumer indifference or regulatory obstacles. Or in the case of lab-grown meat, basic economics: an in-vitro meatball costs $50 to produce.
Livestock are better value than anyone realised and the public, it seems, will not accept substitutes.
The World Bank wants to price meat out of our diets - UnHerd
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