Why does the green movement get such a kick out of telling the world’s poor that they must remain in a state of pre-industrial poverty? Yesterday a team from Cambridge and Aberdeen universities claimed that the biggest threat to the world is the global adoption of “US-style diets”. If everyone eats burgers on an American scale, it asserts, carbon emissions from food production would soar by 80 per cent.
Advocates of mass vegetarianism have moved on from claiming that meat is murder to asserting that it is murdering the planet. Only 3 per cent of the food energy that goes into a farm animal, they say, is converted into food energy for humans. Feeding the world with meat thus uses vastly more land than would be required if everyone followed a vegetarian diet. If only the world’s poor would stick to porridge we could leave rain forests and tropical grasslands to be the Earth’s lungs.
Given that we cleared our own forests centuries ago to create field and pasture, it is a bit patronising to lecture developing countries like this. The meat industry is one way in which poor countries are pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. Far from threatening global starvation, increased global meat consumption has coincided with a huge improvement in diets. According to the World Food Programme, the number of hungry people in the world has fallen by 17 per cent since 1990 — a period in which the global population increased by two billion.
Suppressing the meat industry wouldn’t just be economic vandalism; it wouldn’t do the planet much good either. The Zimbabwean environmentalist Allan Savory used to believe that livestock caused environmental degradation, but has now concluded the opposite. The only way to stop desertification in the world’s drier zones, he believes, is greatly to increase livestock, adopting farming methods that mimic the huge herds of herbivores that lived there before humans. Their trampling and depositing of dung keeps grasslands healthy.
Given that Savory has been working in the field for 60 years, and has demonstrated his theory by experiment, you might think his ideas about regenerating lost grasslands would get a hearing. Instead, he has been jumped on by fellow environmentalists. In the eyes of extreme green ideology there is no worse crime than advocating something humans might actually enjoy — eating animals especially.