Letter from Europe: Meat and milk join the climate change hit-list

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

While Europe's farmers are being encouraged to protect the climate by growing more trees, consumers are being told to down less burgers, sausages and milk shakes

by NORMAN DUNN

European highway users are being continually browbeaten to reduce their "carbon footprint" through buying and driving smaller autos and keeping speeds down on the roads.

This hasn't affected agriculture too negatively. In fact, it has greatly helped farm survival in some areas by kick-starting a stronger demand for renewable fuels, such as canola biodiesel and ethanol from wheat, potatoes and sugar beet.

Then, of course, there's now a good market for wood chips, another renewable fuel to feed central heating furnaces or help reduce fossil fuel input in grain drying. Some of the more enlightened European governments are already making sure that their farmers earn more from this opportunity.

Denmark, for example, is talking about pulling 250,000 acres out of conventional cropping in a bid to stop what it sees as excessive nitrate run-off into waterways and lakes. Danish farmers told me this year that they are fairly sure most of this land will then be allowed to grow low-input (i.e. no-nitrogen fertilizer) renewable energy crops, such as quick growing trees for chipping and fuelling furnaces. Finland, Sweden, Germany and Austria are other countries advocating growing trees for energy instead of conventional cropping on their "nitrate sensitive areas."

Meanwhile, the Netherlands is currently looking at something completely different in the renewable energy field. There, green algae production is being mooted as another low-input energy crop, producing enough oil on a single acre for 8,000 litres of biodiesel, although there's a long way to go before the process is financially viable.

At least at the start, support from the European Union (EU) – usually snatched from cut-backs in conventional crop-growing aid – looks as if it will guarantee gross returns for the energy crop growers similar to wheat and other small grains. But, even if it doesn't, fossil fuels, fertilizer and crop protection sprays are becoming so expensive that very low input regimes will more than likely offer the same gross margins as today's more conventional cash crops.

However, the next development now being discussed in Europe to reduce climate-endangering gas emissions isn't going to be quite so popular with the farming sector. For the latest plan is to start convincing consumers that meat and milk are also global warming culprits.

The so-called Food Climate Research Network at England's University of Surrey says, for instance, that processing and delivering food accounts for something over 19 per cent of Britain's total emissions. On top of this, actually growing the food adds another 18 per cent to emissions.

Meat and milk on their own are among the biggest offenders in this respect, responsible for eight per cent of total greenhouse gas output. Fruit and vegetables add 2.5 per cent to this and even alcohol drink production blasts another 1.5 per cent of total greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere each year.

For once, farmers are not getting the blame for all this. Nor are they being asked to put things right by the University of Surrey scientists, who spent four years researching and producing their report. But there's no denying that they will end up carrying the can again. In giving consumers the responsibility for reducing meat and milk consumption, the Surrey report could, in the worst scenario, have an influence in decreasing demand for these commodities.

To start with, the researchers are recommending a campaign to convince consumers that they should reduce their weekly consumption from the EU average of 1.75 kilograms of meat and four litres milk and milk products to just 500 grams and one litre respectively. The suggested diet would then be equivalent to a single quarter pound (250-gram) hamburger, two sausages, three bacon slices and a single chicken breast each week, along with a litre of milk and 100 grams of cheese.

Chaos amongst different advisory programs is already evident, because we have the United Nations predicting a doubling of meat and dairy product consumption by 2050 in the western world. Going against this tide is going to be a hard row for those advocating a more climate-aware diet. Tara Garnett from the University of Surrey tells us that the drastic cuts in what we eat are absolutely necessary if we are to have any hope of hitting the UN carbon reduction target of minus 80 per cent by 2050.

Maybe there's sense in all this if the unused land is dedicated to renewable fuel production. But none of the researchers has been able to tell us so far what we are going to eat instead of all these tasty burgers, sausages and milk shakes. BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.