Vegans’ arrogance has fat chance of success

‘Well-managed pastoral farming is one of the most efficient ways to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it in the ground.’ Picture: iStock

In January 2019, the Lancet Commission on Obesity issued a report identifying three pandemics that together represented “the paramount health challenge for humans, the environment and our planet in the 21st century”.

The spread of coronavirus and the public policy panic it might induce were not included, nor indeed was any other potential virological menace. The constituent parts of the “Global Syndemic” were obesity, undernutrition and climate change, all of which the report claimed were interconnected.

The production and consumption of red meat was singled out as one of the drivers of this three-headed monster. The growth in global meat production had increased emissions of greenhouse gases and was a major cause of obesity, the report claimed. Paradoxically, perhaps, it was also a cause of undernutrition, since growing feed for livestock took land that could have been used to grow food for humans. Governments should do whatever it took to stamp out this menace.

A better example of conceited, contradictory mumbo-jumbo would be hard to find. Its attempt to lay the world’s supposed evils at the doors of food producers and agriculture corporations smacks of conspiracy. Yet this twisted narrative has become embedded in the worldview of global activists, who have added farming to mining in a list of targets.

We are indebted to JT Critchell’s masterful work, The History of the Frozen Meat Trade, for recording the role Australian farmers played in improving working-class diets in Victorian Britain. Per capita consumption of imported meat rose from virtually nothing in 1850 to 12.7kg in 1910, contributing to a rise in life expectancy from 42 to 52 by the start of World War I.

Today, a well-organised campaign in Europe is trying to reverse those achievements by placing a hefty sin tax on meat, claiming a switch to a vegan diet delivers health benefits equivalent to giving up smoking. True Animal Protein Price Coalition, the Netherlands-based organisation of virtuous vegans behind all this, has the audacity to claim it is helping the poor and vulnerable by pricing meat out of their budgets. “It makes low-income groups, communities and the society at large healthier,” the group smugly proclaims on its website, “and we all will have lower healthcare costs in the end”.

An attempt to force the vegan lifestyle upon an unwilling population based on such a wild, unsupported claim would be unlikely to gain much traction in more rational times. Yet, as Graham Lloyd reported in The Weekend Australian, the proposal is being taken seriously by the UN Food Summit and will be launched this week in Rome. A plan to put a carbon tax on meat will be presented to the UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow at the end of this year.

TAPPC’s manifesto advocates a 42 euro-cents tax per kilo on beef and veal, rising to 4.77 euros by 2030, a measure it forecasts will reduce red meat consumption by two-thirds. The organisation advocates the regulation of red meat as a carcinogen, the evidence for which is disputed.

The claim that farming meat is destroying the planet is as fanciful as the claim that a carnivorous diet harms health. Well-managed pastoral farming is one of the most efficient ways to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it in the ground, where it has the added benefit of improving the fertility of the soil. Livestock are an important part of that cycle, taking in grass at one end and emitting nature’s fertiliser and seeds at the other, hastening the growth of more carbon-hungry vegetation.

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that interrupting this cycle by taking land out of production reduces the stock of soil carbon. A 2016 study, for example, led by Susan Orgill from the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Institute and the NSW Department of Primary Industries, demonstrated just that in a five-year study comparing ungrazed and grazed land.

Concerns about cattle methane emissions have reduced since food additives were found to reduce such emissions, and anyhow methane has been found to have far fewer long-term effects than carbon dioxide emissions.

Far from adding to the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, the 340 million hectares of grazing land in Australia, roughly half the continent’s land mass, offers one of the most effective and efficient ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists estimate 25 gigatons of organic carbon is buried in Australia’s topsoil, equivalent to roughly 180 years of national CO2 emissions at the current rate. Increasing the organic carbon content of soils by just 0.5 per cent, for example, would have the same effect as closing Australia’s coal-fired power stations for three years.

Just as the development of Australia’s golden plains helped feed newly industrialised Europe in the 19th century, so they can help meet the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, if that is where we are heading. Few other places in the world have the same potential, which is why the world carbon market looks to Australian agriculture as a rich source of reliable offsets.

Unlike other forms of bio-sequestration, like forestry, that take agricultural land out of production, increasing soil carbon through grazing has the benefit of making farming more resilient and more productive. The contribution of farming was recognised in an initiative launched at the Paris meeting and is increasingly being factored into sensible mainstream thinking on atmospheric management.

The global politics of climate change, however, is growing less sensible by the day. The top-down, multilateral framework, embodied in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been spectacularly ineffective, and indeed counterproductive, in dealing with the supposed challenge.

The UNFCCC is the latest in a long line of failed or failing supranational bodies that have not made the world a better place. Yet the machinery blunders on from Kyoto to Paris and now to somewhere else via Glasgow, dragging its mistakes along with it. The reduction in emissions by responsible nations, like Australia, seems puny besides the growth in emissions in China, which have tripled since the fateful 1992 decision at Kyoto to give the world’s most populous country a leave pass.

The less effective the UN initiative is, the more dangerous it becomes as its proponents look around for scapegoats. The campaign for net-zero emissions by 2050 is a convenient distraction from the mechanism’s problems and the failure of many countries to meet their commitments. Demonising meat eaters and the farmers who feed them is another.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.