14 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019
person. This included red meat just once a
month and 250g of dairy food a day.
Other analysts have extrapolated trade-
offs, with lesser but still meaningful climate
benefits to be had from more people turning
pescatarian, vegetarian and other permuta-
tions. All up, move over fat grams, calories
and Weight Watchers points: the new “IPCC
diet” means counting the carbon-offset
points on our plates.AGRICULTURE IN THE FRONT LINE
This message places the farm sector on
notice to make ever bigger compromises and
sacrifices to halt global warming. We’ll need
farmers more than ever, but the irreducible-
seeming bottom line is that many will have
to convert their farms or even exit the sector.
Fairly but in vain will our farmers point
out that their emissions have been falling
since the 1990s and that they’re not the
king carbon emitters. The IPCC’s preferred
sequencing of what signatory countries do is
now putting agriculture, rather than heavy
industry, in the front line of the climate’s
defence – and in the place where the tough-
est trade-offs should be made.
The report says more than 70% of the
Earth’s ice-free land is already shaped by
human activity, yet we’re only using one
quarter to one third of our land’s potential
net primary production for food, feed, fibre,
timber and energy.
Continued destruction of forests and
intensive farming, with its methaneemissions, will hasten climate change, while
making sufficient food production overall
more difficult. Farmed livestock generate
about 14% of man-made greenhouse gas
emissions – rising to 23% if their feed crop
production is counted – which doesn’t
sound much, until its disproportionate land
use is factored in. It takes twice as much land
to raise livestock as it does to grow crops.
Also, a third of all the crops grown globally
are to feed a farmed animal.
According to a study of 119 countries pub-lished in the journal Science last year, meat
provides only 18% of calories and 37% of
protein eaten worldwide, but commandeers
83% of farmland and contributes 56-58% of
food’s greenhouse emissions.
Armed with such statistics, a new doctor-
founded lobby group, Evidence-Based Eating
New Zealand, has recently been set up to
lobby for the transition to a plant-based diet
and challenge the scientific analyses and jus-
tifications promoted by the meat and dairy
industries. This month it disputed Fonterra’sdefence of cows’ milk against plant-derived
substitutes on the basis of far superior
comparable nutrient density, saying other
environmental factors and health effects
make milk less desirable.
New Zealand’s profile is globally highly
unusual, in that its biological emissions
from agriculture make up nearly half of all
our emissions – that’s including livestock
methane, nitrogen fertilisers and the nitrous
oxide generated by stock’s liquid and solid
emissions breaking down in the soil.
In economic terms, the elephant is the
room. Our only comparable earner to meat
and dairy is tourism with, unfortunately for
us, air travel being another front-line culprit
for climate change. The farm sector’s hopes
of surviving the Emissions Trading Scheme
system and the IPCC’s road map in com-
petitive shape are pinned on our existing
status as a world-leading sustainable food
producer. Even the Guardian, a newspaper
notoriously hard-line about climate change,
recently instructed its readers to buy New
Zealand lamb, ahead of British, because even
counting food miles, it remains the world’s
most sustainably produced.
Agri-business and farm sector representa-
tives have being laying out their rationale
to the Zero Carbon Bill hearings at Parlia-
ment, including a call by Federated Farmers
for some form of credit for farmers who do
better than the eventually agreed methane-
emissions targets.
“But we don’t want a return to subsidies,”
says Federated Farmers spokesperson Andrew
Hoggard. That’s hardly surprising – painful
and destructive as it was for farmers when
the Lange Government axed subsidies in the
1980s, it’s generally agreed to be the change
most responsible for the international com-
petitiveness of the sector today. Almost all
other countries’ farm sectors continue to be
subsidised. New Zealand’s sheep and, more
lately, dairy farmers have found ways to
be as or more profitable with smaller stock
numbers than most subsidised competitors.
Export earnings today are about as much
from the existing 24 million national sheep
flock as when it was 70 million.CHARGE OF THE FARM BRIGADE
The sector’s chief argument with the Gov-
ernment is over the pace and range of future
methane-reduction targets. It wants moreGE transition time while new technology comes
TT
Y^ I
MA
GE
S
It takes twice as much
land to raise livestock as
it does to grow crops, and
a third of all the cropsgrown globally are to
feed a farmed animal.Call to arms: IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee
(centre) at a press conference.