The recent revelation that new Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery has a contract with Meat and Livestock Australia shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody who read his 2008 Quarterly Essay Now or Never: A sustainable future for Australia.
But I think both the relationship and the essay demonstrate that Flannery is not the right person for the job.
Flannery’s advocacy in Now or Never of abundant meat as the answer to global food problems is like suggesting private jets to solve transportation problems.
With a billion undernourished people and the FAO Food Price index at an all-time high, food shortages are already stunting and killing children globally in a cataclysm that will only get worse in an increasingly disruptive climate.
The right food policies can not only end food shortages but be a potent weapon to reduce our warming influence on the climate. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has calculated that merely phasing out coal by 2030 isn’t enough to keep our climate in the relatively benign state it has been for the last few thousand years. We must also reduce non-CO2 warming factors like black carbon and methane and roll-back 200 years of deforestation to further reduce atmospheric CO2.
The planet’s 1.4 billion cattle provide an opportunity for reforestation while simultaneously improving food security. Cattle have been among the prime drivers of that two centuries of deforestation both locally and globally.
A study last year from Queensland University researchers with US colleagues showed that deforestation in Eastern Australia together with globally rising sea surface temperatures was what made our recent droughts hotter. Cattle producers regularly set fires around the planet to prevent natural reforestation reclaiming pasture while the cattle themselves are a significant source of methane and nitrous oxide. But for all this, cattle provide bugger-all food.
How much? Somewhat less than 1.4 percent of global food calories.
A significant part of Flannery’s Quarterly Essay was about food, but the only food he discussed was meat and eggs - with heavy emphasis on grass-fed cattle. The figure of 1.4 per cent above also includes feedlot cattle - grass-fed cattle are an even smaller amount. Meat in its entirety is about 8 percent of global food and grass-fed meat is only about 8 percent of that. So grass-fed meat (not just cattle) is about one half of one percent of global food but dominates Flannery’s global food vision. No wonder MLA love him.
In addition to being obsessed with a globally irrelevant and destructive food, Flannery’s preferred farming systems don’t scale.
Denmark has half of one per cent of our 770 million hectares of land. But its 4.3 million hectares produce almost 2 million tonnes of pork by feeding pigs about 7 million tonnes of grain. How much land do you need to grow 7 million tonnes of grain? The Danes only import about 1 million of those 7 million and still have room for wind farms and Viking museums.
Australia’s ruminant industries by comparison cleared about 70 million hectares in an orgy of destruction and extinctions. They also graze another 330 or so million hectares and produce just 3 million tonnes of red meat that has made us the bowel cancer capital of the planet.
But even that land isn’t enough - we supplement ruminant grazing with grain feeding. How much grain? Oh, about 4 million tonnes. This is more than double what we eat as breakfast cereal, bread and the like. And then there’s the other 2 million tonnes of cereal for dairy cattle for those who put milk (no, Ms Coles, we don’t ALL buy milk!) on that cereal.
So much space, so much destruction, so many extinctions, so much grain, so little meat.
Flannery thinks factory farming is unsustainable. But such claims are meaningless without specifying how much meat you want to produce. Anything is sustainable if hardly anybody does it. Real meat experts know that factory farms are efficient. The UN authors of the landmark 2006 Livestock’s Long Shadow demonstrated that increased factory farming is the only way to supply any increasing demand for meat. The alternative is the continued obliteration of the world’s remaining tropical forests for grazing.
I’d love it if Flannery was right and there were more efficient and humane forms of meat production for culinary Luddites who won’t kick the habit.
But he’s every kind of wrong. Factory farms are an efficient obscenity.
They and associated abattoirs are horrid vicious places exploiting and degrading people as well as animals. They produce unhealthy products - red meat (be it grazed or feedlot) causes bowel cancer and all meat causes heart disease via saturated fat. Feedlots outbid the world’s poor for food directly and more insidiously by seducing farmers to grow feed grains rather than food because it is more profitable.
Hansen’s reforestation and methane reduction imperative requires the elimination of a surplus and unhealthy food - meat. This big task may not possible with an MLA fellow-traveller as Climate Commissioner.
We need a Climate Commissioner with a more rational approach to food policy.
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