Dear Editor,
In November 2016, just as Trump was winning the White House, I was in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, representing Barbados at an Inter-American Development Bank Pan-American Conference. I made a plenary presentation on “Diet Change, Not Climate Change”, which afterwards led to the head of the Translation Unit approaching me, to say that he had covered many international conferences, but had never heard anyone speak about the role of meat in environmental destruction.
Almost daily we hear local, regional, and global politicians speaking about “the existential threat of Climate Change”. In the context of the Caribbean politicians, this is unfortunately largely motivated with a view to receiving funding to mitigate the effects of Climate Change. Apparently for these regional politicians, Climate Change is perceived as a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. There is no serious engagement with the issue of Climate Change. It is all about what we can get out of a Climate Change insurance policy, rather than what we can do to put out the fire. Or in the words of Greta Thunberg, it is all so much “blah blah blah”. Yes, we know that historically most of the residual greenhouse gases were produced in the industrialised north, starting with the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, particularly using power generated from the use of coal as a fuel, and moving onto oil and gas in the twentieth century – to make products of which due to colonialism, we were enforced consumers of for years – evidently those industrial products were not just for use in the metropolitan centres, but also for use in the colonised spheres. China is today’s global factory, and we as consumers of Chinese made products, are indirectly responsible for China’s current emissions.
There needs to be a serious engagement with this Climate Change phantom that will wreck the Planet as we know it, with Small Island Developing States being particularly vulnerable due to sea level rise, along with climate injustice for the marginalised. Our own regional emissions may be miniscule as compared with China and the United States of America, but on a metric ton per capita [mtpc] level we are not insignificant – with Barbados and France almost level pegging at 4.4 and 4.6 mtpc, per annum respectively. Trinidad is at 12.4 mtpc, whilst China is at 7.4 mtpc. Even little St. Kitts is producing similar mtpc as is the United Kingdom at 5 mtpc each approximately. There are no updated statistics for Guyana, given the huge emissions now being produced there with the fossil fuels, including flaring, at present. The United States is in a league of its own, at 15.2 mtpc – if we all consumed global resources as they do, we would need three planets! As a totality the United States produces annually, 15 per cent of global greenhouse emissions. However, it is not good enough to point fingers at others, whilst we are throwing petrol [literally] on the Climate Change flames.
Meat and dairy production [excluding refrigeration] accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and with refrigeration factored in, they amount to some 18 per cent, much more than global road, sea, and air transport combined – which by comparison accounts for only 13 per cent of global annual greenhouse gas emissions. Aviation, for which there is a growing global movement to boycott- [which would have dire consequences on tourist based economies] – represents a mere 2 per cent of total global greenhouse emissions. In other words, meat and dairy alone amount to more than the annual global warming emissions of the world’s biggest single emitter, the United States of America. Yet the focus is misplaced on aviation and transport generally. Why is this? Is cutting out meat and dairy literally too hard to swallow? Is it too much of an infringement on our comfort zones, that we prefer to drown with sea level rise, or be decimated by a hurricane? Or is it that the vested interests of the meat industry, control policy? It is notable that a recent BBC report referenced the lobbying by Brazil [the world’s biggest producer of meat per capita] of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to get them to downplay the role of meat in global warming, not only in terms of emissions but also as regards the loss of a natural carbon sinks like the Amazon, which is being destroyed and becoming a net producer of carbon, due to cattle ranching and the production of soya for animal feeds. 70 per cent of rainforest destruction is attributed to cattle ranching, or to the growing of animal feeds.
Livestock production [ignoring other forms of meat] uses 8 per cent of the world’s fresh water. 33 per cent of global arable land is used for meat production. 20 per cent of global arable land has been degraded to almost desert due to overgrazing. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent as a global warming gas than CO2 – 65 per cent globally is produced by the meat/dairy industry, according to the FAO.
Adopting a balanced B12 supplemented plant-based diet, is the single biggest way humans can reduce their environmental impact on the planet – from land use [five times more land is required to produce a pound of meat protein as opposed to a pound of plant protein]; water use
[a pound of meat protein requires some ten times more water than a pound of plant protein]; to reducing at least as much greenhouse gases as is produced by the United States of America annually, and so most importantly keeping the global temperature rise below the 1.5 C threshold, as compared with pre-industrial levels . To say nothing of having a healthier population, with less NCDs, and obesity. Rastafarians who largely have a plant-based diet, are seldom obese. The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide obesity has tripled since 1975, with more than 1.9 billion overweight adults, and 381 million children, overweight or obese. Studies show that people who eat fewer animal products have lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer. The WHO Country Head in China is on record as saying that as long as we eat meat, there will be pandemics and zoonotic diseases. Plants have never been responsible for a pandemic! Most of the viral infections that assail humans, have a meat-eating historical link, even measles. And then there is antibiotic resistance – some eighty percent of antibiotics currently in use, are used in animal farming, this usage is largely responsible for the rising global antibiotic resistance. And last but not least, is animal cruelty. We have heard of glass ceilings re gender matters, but if abattoirs had glass walls, most of us would be on a plant-based diet!
Yours faithfully,
Lalu Hanuman
Attorney-at-Law,
