Human dietary changes needed to save planet
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FOREIGN VIEWS
This December, world leaders will meet in Paris for the UN Climate Change Conference, where they will hammer out a comprehensive agreement to reduce carbon emissions and stem global warming.
In the run-up to that meeting, governments worldwide should note one critical, but often overlooked, fact: the single biggest driver of environmental degradation and resource stress today is our changing diet — a diet that is not particularly conducive to a healthy life, either.
In recent decades, rising incomes have catalyzed a major shift in people’s eating habits, with meat, in particular, becoming an increasingly important feature of people’s diets. Given that livestock require much more food, land, water, and energy to raise and transport than plants, increased demand for meat depletes natural resources, places pressure on food-production systems, damages ecosystems, and fuels climate change.
Meat production is about 10 times more water-intensive than plant-based calories and proteins, with one kilogram of beef, for example, requiring 15,415 liters of water.
Moreover, livestock production consumes one-third of the total water resources used in agriculture (which accounts for 71 percent of the world’s water consumption), as well as more than 40 percent of the global output of wheat, rye, oats, and corn.
And livestock production uses 30 percent of the earth’s land surface that once was home to wildlife, thereby playing a critical role in biodiversity loss and species extinction.
It took more than a century for the European diet to reach the point at which meat is consumed at every meal, including breakfast. But, in large parts of Asia, a similar shift has occurred in just one generation. Meaty diets have created a global obesity problem, including, of all places, in China.
Americans consume the most meat per capita, after Luxembourgers. Given the size of the US population, this is already a problem. If the rest of the world caught up to the United States — where meat consumption averages 125.4 kilograms per person annually, compared with a measly 3.2 kilograms in India — the environmental consequences would be catastrophic.
Already, the signs are worrying. The demand for meat is projected to increase by 50 percent from 2013 to 2025, with overall consumption still rising in the West and soaring in the developing world.
In order to ensure that their animals gain weight rapidly, meat producers feed them grain, rather than the grass that they would naturally consume — an approach that is a major source of pressure on grain production, natural resources, and the environment.
Making matters worse, the livestock are injected with large amounts of hormones and antibiotics. In the US, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold are administered prophylactically to livestock. Yet this has been inadequate to stem the spread of disease; in fact, with many of the new and emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originating in animals, veterinarians, microbiologists, and epidemiologists have been trying to understand the “ecology of disease” (how nature, and humanity’s impact on it, spreads disease).
Though the environmental and health costs of our changing diets have been widely documented, the message has gone largely unheard. With the world facing a serious water crisis, rapidly increasing global temperatures, staggering population growth, and growing health problems like coronary disease, this must change — and fast.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books. Copyright: Project Syndicate 1995-2015. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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