Livestock production may have a bigger impact on the planet than anything else. A new study shows how the effects vary from country to country — and points the way toward a more sustainable future
Livestock production — which includes meat, milk and eggs — contributes 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product, provides income for more than 1.3 billion people and uses one-third of the world’s fresh water. There may be no other single human activity that has a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock. But as a new study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows, there is tremendous variation in how we raise livestock around the world — and major differences in what that means for the earth and for us.
Researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria produced a comprehensive assessment of the livestock industry around the world, in developed nations where factory farming is common and in developing nations where livestock are more likely to graze on grasslands. They dug up some striking statistics that underscore just how much meat production varies from region to region.
Each year the livestock sector globally produces 586 million tons of milk, 124 million tons of poultry, 91 million tons of pork, 59 million tons of cattle and buffalo meat, and 11 million tons of meat from sheep and goats. That 285 million tons of meat altogether — or about 36 kg (80 lb.) per person, if it were all divided evenly. It’s not — Americans eat 122 kg (270 lb.) of meat a year on average, while Bangladeshis eat 1.8 kg (4 lb).
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So what does this all mean? While factory farming in the U.S. gets a lot of criticism for its cruelty, the danger it poses to public health through the overuse of antibiotics and the pollution it causes to air and water, it can be remarkably efficient. And given the fact that the planet isn’t getting any bigger while the global population and the global appetite keep growing, efficiency is going to matter when it comes to food production. The upside of inefficient livestock production in the developing world is that there is a lot of room to improve, given the right kind of help — which is exactly what the authors of the PNAS paper are hoping for.
“Our data can allow us to see more clearly where we can work with livestock keepers to improve animal diets so they can produce more protein with better feed while simultaneously reducing emissions,” said Petr Havlik, a research scholar at IIASA and a co-author of the study. What we need is “sustainable intensification” — efficiency but pursued in a measured way.
That’s not to say it would be advisable simply to export developed-world livestock practices to, say, desperately poor, climatically challenged countries, even if it were possible. The low livestock-feed efficiencies in sub-Saharan Africa is due to the fact that most animals in the region consist on vegetation that is not edible by human beings — a fact that’s fairly important in a region where grain is simply too precious to use for animals. Livestock also serves a different function in the developing world. “Cattle and poultry can be walking banks in the developing world,” says Mario Herrero, an agricultural-systems scientist at CSIRO and a co-author of the paper. “They provide manure to small-holder farmers. There’s a tremendous social role for livestock that can’t be ignored.”
Above all else, the study underscores that while meat production will need to change in the future, so will meat consumption. It’s difficult to get a full and proper accounting of the total environmental impact of livestock production. A 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that livestock were responsible for about 18% of human-caused greenhouse gases — a figure that has been criticized by the meat industry as too high and by some environmentalists as far too low. But what’s clear is that American levels of meat consumption can’t be sustainably adopted by the rest of the world, even if livestock management becomes more efficient globally. “Demand management has to be part of the solution as well,” says Herrero. For the environment — and for our hearts and waistlines too.