The World One Argument
This article continues from Cowtroversy Part 1 – Regen vs Vegan, an overview of the opposing views of animals in agriculture. In this second article, we focus on World One’s Argument – arguing for low or no meat, with the extreme view being veganism.
Written by Paul Frobisher, it is an account of observations of perspectives from attending multiple events and desk research.
Land Use
The amount of land needed for food production has increased to feed our growing population. This has been a major contributor to encroachment into natural ecosystems and a primary driver of deforestation and desertification. 46% of habitable land is taken up by agriculture, with just 23% of that being for crops. The remaining 77% of the land used for livestock provides only 18% of calorie supply and 37% of protein.
This argument is one of land use efficiency. Crops appear far more efficient converters of land area into nutrition. By eating less meat, and more plants we can keep pace with increased demand without using more land. And according to the data here, shifting to a vegan diet would significantly reduce land area needed, through the elimination of crops grown for animal feed. This negates a counterargument that large areas of pasture land are unsuitable for crop production.
Intensification of crop production therefore has been a good thing. Scientific approaches to fertilisation, irrigation, crop protection and genetics have decoupled the proportional relationship between land area and food output. This has allowed the world to produce more than enough food to avoid mass starvation.
George Monbiot uses such data to argue strongly for land sparing. Organic and particularly the emerging regenerative agricultural movement are therefore the worst form of farming because they are extensive rather than intensive. In other words, any approaches that reduce yield as these alternative farming approaches are thought to do, are fundamentally bad, implying that applied globally they would necessitate further encroachment into nature.
Professor Tim Benton, speaker at the Sustain #Meatdabate and Groundswell 2024 agrees. In this 2013 paper his research team found that when controlling for a 54% lower yield in lowland England, biodiversity of Organic fields of winter wheat exhibited no increase in biodiversity when compared to standard practice. This study suggests that the increases in biodiversity observed in Organic systems is in direct proportion to the reduction in yield. This too favours the argument for further intensification and land sparing.
George Monbiot in his book Regenesis suggests that radically innovative new forms of food can be produced through nascent technologies such as precision fermentation. For example, Solein®, developed by Solarfoods is in the final stages of development and commercialisation. Solein is based on the growth of single-cell organisms fed by gasses including CO2 and mineral nutrients to create protein macro molecules with a balanced nutritional profile. Making food partially from thin air and renewable energy in a tiny geographical footprint, freeing up land for nature.
Critics argue that developments such as these are unlikely to become dominant sources of food, being potentially bland and uninteresting to consumers. But Monbiot skilfully points out that when the first pastoralists had the idea of drinking milk from animals, they were not thinking about camembert! If he knew TRIZ, he would be pointing this out as a perfect example of S Curve innovation dynamics. Precision fermentation and other nascent technologies are right at the beginning of the S Curve, and have the potential to become the new dominant, most ideal form of food production – replacing traditional farming which will soon feel like being as antiquated as the horse and carriage.
The World One land use argument is therefore that it is best to phase out animal agriculture, continue intensification and efficiency which will free large areas to return to nature to the benefit of biodiversity.
Carbon / Methane
The viral film Cowspiracy.com states that “livestock and their emissions account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions”. Whilst this headline is perhaps taking a very worst-case view, (they also mention the more widely accepted 18% figure), the consensus is that agriculture is a major contributor to carbon equivalent emissions.
A commonly quoted graphic to support the World One argument is the following from Our World in Data, based on an analysis by Poor and Nemecek in 2018. It demonstrates that animal production and beef, in particular, dominate the greenhouse gas emissions arising from food production. This is largely due to the well-known contribution of methane emissions from belching ruminants. Again, the clear message is that a shift to an exclusively plant-based diet would make significant inroads to the net zero objective.
You can this graphic, derivations and similar OurWorldinData statistics in IPCC reports, COPxx events, the BBC website, school and university teaching materials, as well as activist productions such as Cowspiracy. Professor Tim Benton also quotes these sources.
In many conversations, methane emissions alone have been used as a sufficient argument for minimising livestock farming and red meat consumption. According to sources cited by Cowspiracy, methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas 86 times more potent and 25-100 times more destructive than CO2 over a 20 year time frame. And according to OurWorldinData again, agriculture accounts for the largest proportion of human-caused methane emissions on a per capita basis, with livestock being a significant contributor.
Proponents of the opposing Worldview Two claim that adaptive planned grazing strategies enable livestock to sequester carbon through increasing soil organic matter. A farmer-led movement subscribes to this view, the figurehead being Allan Savory who’s TED talk went viral in 2013.
In an attempt to settle the argument, Garnet et al, published Grazed and Confused (2017) an extensive analysis of the available literature and data at the time. The team concluded:
“The potential contribution of grazing ruminants to soil carbon sequestration is small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions they generate”
This study is cited by critics of ‘regenerative’ or organic farming as settling the argument. George Monbiot considers that regenerative is a nice-sounding name that is tantamount to greenwashing. “Regenerative farming is still farming, and farming is inherently bad” he says. Helpfully, George has published an extract from his book Regenesis, which fleshes out why he believes regenerative grazing generally, and Allan Savory specifically is wrong, backed up with 39 scientific papers and articles.
Water
Agriculture accounts for 92% of humanity’s water footprint, with animal agriculture taking a disproportionally large share, particularly beef. Water scarcity is an increasing problem that can be solved by restricting or eliminating animal agriculture.
Further, pollution from runoff of animal farming activities causes significant harm to watercourses, eventually ending up in the sea resulting in dead zones, eutrophication and harms to biodiversity.
Animal Welfare
Livestock have a bad life, especially those in confined factory-like facilities. Chickens and pigs are cramped together, reared for speed of growth, unable to express natural behaviours. Dairy cows are forcibly inseminated to give birth at unnatural times of year and torn away from their infant calves. Beef cattle are fed unnatural feedstuff and confined in dystopian feed lots for fattening and unable to lead a full life span. All of them are plied with steroids, antibiotics, and other medications and inhumanely slaughtered.
Livestock are cruelly exploited, whereas other animals are treated as family members, invited into our homes. Why should we see any sentient being as so different to another purely based on our socially adapted mindset and greed? As animals ourselves, we should treat all animals as we should do each other; equally, with empathy and love.
To the Vegan community, these arguments are sufficient in themselves to justify the cessation of animal-based agriculture. During the Sustain event, the vegan standpoint I heard was that the environmental reasons only serve to further validate this position.
Human Health
You do not need to spend long reading the press or social media, reading about diet or talking to friends to understand that society appears to be moving away from meat, especially red meat. At the Future Food Symposium 2024, a panel discussion including experts Claire Lynch RD and Vanessa Sturman facilitated by Dr Terri Holloway discussed this topic. As leading influencers in advising on nutrition, and helping clients transition to healthy low meat and meat-free diets, the panel gave many arguments as to why plant-based diets are the most healthy.
In conversation, the panel expressed a view that red meat is unhealthy, being a source of saturated fats which cause cardiovascular diseases and that “red meat is a class one carcinogen, validated by the WHO and a body of scientific literature”. This appears to be referring to this press release and associated paper in The Lancet from a team of 22 scientists who met at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon in 2015.
Further, the Lancet has formed a collaboration with the EAT foundation based in Norway to bring together 37 world-leading cross-discipline scientists to answer the question “Can we feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries”. The first major publication from this group, supported by multiple partner organisations was the EAT-Lancet report (2019). This report is cited frequently by the press, researchers, activists and policymakers. It is perhaps the most influential body of work based upon a Worldview One perspective. It has received criticism, especially from omnivores, who according to the dietary guidance are restricted to very small quantities of meat, only 14g or 30 kcal of red meat per day. But this report remains highly influential as it provides clear guidance on diet that caters for both healthy nutrition and planetary care.
Other Arguments
I sat for around 15 minutes with the XR protestors glued to the Hotel in Amsterdam hosting the 2022 Regenerative Food Systems Summit, and asked them why they were there. It was an interesting conversation.
These well-educated young people have taken the data and statistics we have discussed so far, and together with pessimistic projections of climate sensitivity to CO2, based their activism around a sense of palpable fear. The climate emergency. They see the causes being routed in abuse of power, systems of oppression, privilege, and politics. They blame colonialism, white privilege, white supremacy, misogyny, industrialisation, and Western capitalism for destroying the planet. They were protesting the event because the big multinationals were leading the conference, which they saw as a greenwashing tactic from the epicentre of the capitalist system. And simultaneously stealing regenerative principles and practices from Indigenous and First Nation peoples and then taking credit for those practices. They do not trust the system.
Some of their arguments are aimed against both world views as long as they exist within a capitalist economic system. But they do hold that animal agriculture is responsible for mass extinction and an existential threat to humanity.
World view one in a nutshell
We have to intensify food production and reduce livestock farming to almost zero. At the same time, we should encourage innovative, sustainable new food production techniques to provide new approaches to protein and fats. These two measures will reduce greenhouse emissions, reduce water consumption and the freed-up land will allow the return of natural landscapes. This rewilding will absorb atmospheric carbon and reverse ecosystem decline. Saving our species and the planet on which we flourish.
Plants are generally good for our health and meat is harmful. Eating plants will save our health and allow humanity to flourish. At the Sustain event, I was party to a discussion that I think I can remember word for word:
“I really can’t see why we even need to debate this. It’s like anti-vaxers or climate deniers. It is so obvious that we basically have to ban meat, at least tax it like tobacco and ban advertising. There is no time for more talk or arguments, we are wasting time, I’m fed up, to be honest, we just have to act now”
In this huddle, there was broad agreement with that sentiment.
So, that’s it then; case closed. Anyone who disagrees is either ignorant or influenced by big oil or big business. They may otherwise be stuck in their ways, selfish, resistant to change or a climate-denying readers of the Daily Mail.
But are we being too hasty? Maybe we should look over the fence at the World Two view…. We can do that by going inside the Regenerative Systems Conference to explore what the protestors were missing see the next post
