Scientific expertise from the Covid-19 crisis and its relevance to challenges in our food systems, climate, and biodiversity loss has been disregarded.
Although Britain has emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, our collective trauma still casts a long shadow. As we inch closer to the independent public inquiry, which will examine the UK’s public response to the crisis, decisions made by Government are once again coming under intense scrutiny.
Both the current and former Prime Minister are mired in efforts to control the narrative about decisions they made. A pointed editorial in The Observer asks, ‘why was the science ignored?’ and this will surely become a key question that Baroness Hallett grapples with and the public demands answers to.
Having worked both in government and for the past 5 years in environmental, climate and animal welfare charities, this question feels wearingly predictable. The answers The Observer offers to its own question – a No. 10 and Treasury that disregarded scientific expert advice over ‘economics and short-term political considerations’ – apply in even greater respect to the existential threats we are facing from the climate and biodiversity crises. Here too, policy makers’ claims to follow the science ring hollow as we destroy the capacity of our living planet to support life.
Nowhere is the gap between science and public policy more pronounced than in the future of our food systems. Industrial farming is a key driver of both the climate and biodiversity crises. Global food systems generate a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and are responsible for up to 80% of biodiversity loss.
In my lifetime, some 40 years, we have seen the rise of industrial livestock, or factory farming, which creates an enormous burden on our planet’s ecosystems and climate. Around 80% of all agricultural land is used for livestock, including both grazing land and land use for growing animal feed crops.
According to the April 2022 IPCC report, even if all fossil fuel emissions were immediately eliminated, unabated food system emissions alone would jeopardise the 1.5 degrees Celsius target and threaten the 2 degrees Celsius target. If industrial agriculture is left unchecked, it is projected to produce 52% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2050, 80% of which will come from meat and dairy.
Whilst the UK prides itself on our high animal welfare standards and environmental regulations, the reality is that over 80% of animals produced in the UK are factory farmed, our dying waterways are polluted with agricultural run-off that threatens public health through anti-microbial resistance, and we buy in animal feed and meat products produced by degrading fragile eco-systems from around the world.
In a recent report ranking countries by the percentage reduction of meat and dairy consumption needed to bring consumers to within planetary boundaries, the UK is ranked 21st. Collectively, we need to reduce our meat consumption by 60%. We all have an individual responsibility to eat more consciously. Forget meat-free Mondays, we need meat-free Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, at least.
Our response to the immense challenge of establishing a humane and sustainable food system has been woefully inadequate. The promise of reforming subsidies to provide ‘public money for public goods’ has been let down by timid political implementation. The government commissioned and then disowned an independent food strategy that showed rare clarity of purpose. It entirely neglects policy tools available to shape consumer demand away from cheap, low welfare meat and dairy.
Meanwhile the UK is lining up trade deals that will open the door to imports produced to even lower standards and undermine our own domestic producers. At international environmental summits, the destructive role of industrial farming in the climate and biodiversity crises has been given little attention and left firmly in the “too difficult to deal with” box.
What we urgently need, both internationally and at home, is real leadership that can demonstrate the courage to follow the science, make difficult decisions to do what is necessary, and prepare our societies for a just transition to achieve it.
This must start at COP28, where governments including the UK, must acknowledge the role of industrial livestock in the climate crisis. At home, the next government must use all the policy levers available to it to kick off a food revolution that will transform our industrial food system into one that regenerates our living planet and puts animal welfare at its heart. If we fail, no lessons learned will save us.
Tricia Croasdell's letter to editor highlights the urgent need for science-based action and transformative leadership to address the destructive impact of industrial farming. Read further on The Observer.
Nowhere is the gap between science and public policy more pronounced than in the future of our food systems. Industrial farming is a key driver of both the climate and biodiversity crises
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