Climate Crisis

Irish leaders need to start being honest about livestock’s long shadow and our unsustainable diets

Meat and dairy provides only 13% of calories globally but are responsible for nearly 85% of greenhouse gas emissions linked with food production

The meat industry has come under fire for downplaying the climate impacts of meat production. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh
The meat industry has come under fire for downplaying the climate impacts of meat production. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh
Sadhbh O'Neill
Thu Aug 22 2024 - 05:24

It is almost a year since the Environmental Protection Agency deleted a now-famous tweet advising people to cut down on their red meat consumption after a hostile reaction from Irish farming organisations.

At the time, the agency’s director general Laura Burke argued that to reduce a complex debate to a single tweet would “diminish the seriousness of the discussion we need to have”; presumably about land use, climate change and diets.

It is indeed a complex issue. Optimising the nutritional health of a global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 while minimising environmental and climate impacts is a challenge of epic proportions. It will require every single scientific, cultural and behavioural lever we have to be put to work. It will also require a political shift so that the role of the state is redirected in support of a food production model that is healthy, affordable and environmentally sustainable.

In truth we are not always very sensible in our food choices, something that is not helped by the abundance of cheap, ultra-processed foods all around us. Subsisting on pizza and chips might have less of a climate impact but such a diet is clearly not healthy. And yes, avocados do have a big impact due to the food miles associated with ripening and transporting them from the tropics. Some animal products provide essential nutrients that can be difficult to replace. Then there is the issue of food waste: over a third of all the food that is produced for human consumption is wasted.

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Yet the straightforward and unarguable message that a sustainable diet in the Global North requires reducing consumption of red meat to about 98g per week as recommended by the EAT-Lancet commission (though other experts recommend higher amounts) is not being communicated by any State agency in Ireland. Not by the EPA, not by the Department of Health, not by the Department of Agriculture and Food, not by SafeFood and certainly not by Bord Bia or Teagasc.

No debate on sustainable diets has taken place in the Oireachtas since the EPA tweet debacle. TD Paul Murphy asked the Minister for Agriculture last November why his department could not promote plant-based diets alongside meat and dairy. The Minister’s reply was revealing: he said that the food Irish farmers produce is “massively nutritious”, ducking the point entirely.

The then taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s modest announcement in 2019 that he was eating less red meat for health reasons led to a furore. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty
The then taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s modest announcement in 2019 that he was eating less red meat for health reasons led to a furore. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty

With agriculture accounting for roughly 40 per cent of global land use, and 19-37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, big shifts will be required in our food systems if we are to have any chance of holding global temperatures below 2 degrees of warming and feeding the world’s population.

Specifically, livestock’s “long shadow” will have to be reduced: meat and dairy provides only 13 per cent of calories and about 30 per cent of protein globally, yet are responsible for nearly 85 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production, as well as a disproportionate level of other key environmental impacts.

We might eat locally produced meat and dairy foods but this does not mean that our diet is “sustainable”: the estimated in 2023 that the typical Irish adult diet exceeds the planetary boundary for carbon dioxide by 226 per cent. Alongside a deteriorating environment we are witnessing alarming rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and some cancers that are diet related. Surely the promotion of a sustainable diet is a win-win then, for human and planetary health.

It seems that none of our leaders are brave enough to propose policies that promote alternative food choices for fear of triggering a furore similar to that which followed then taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s modest announcement in 2019 that he was eating less red meat for health reasons. The best way to win an argument it seems is to simply shut down the debate altogether.

But the main actors in this non-debate are careful to stay out of the limelight. The meat industry in particular has come under fire for downplaying the climate impacts of meat production. Teagasc, for example, has given its backing to the Dublin Declaration, which praises the livestock sector’s social and economic contribution and dismisses the call for reduced meat consumption as “zealotry”. In any other domain we would call this regulatory capture.

It is worth recalling the words of outgoing Tirlan CEO Jim Bergin who stated in May this year that “we should never contemplate giving up one animal of our dairy herd” to get a sense of the kind of pressure the dairy processing sector can command at a time when farmers are under growing pressure. But the longer term impact of the lobbying by the meat and dairy industry is that the public space to discuss food systems and animal welfare has been shrinking.

Isn’t it time then to start talking about sustainable food systems and to get our public health agencies to actively promote sustainable diets?

Sadhbh O’Neill is an independent climate and environment researcher

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