This week's post is a special edition of The Green Edge Podcast, featuring a conversation with Dr Marcus Bellett-Travers, agri-food technology lead at Anglia Ruskin University.
I was slightly disappointed by this episode. Efforts to use UK land to support more biodiversity and sequester carbon were presented as a threat to food security. However, I think there’s a strong argument that the greatest barrier to improved food security – as well as more biodiversity and carbon sequestration – is the current way that we use land. As was pointed out in the Government commissioned National Food Strategy, 85% of UK land is used to feed animals. However, this land produces just 32% of our calories. The 15% of UK land used to grow food crops, on the other hand, produces 68% of our calories. So our current use of land is incredibly inefficient from a food security perspective, as well as bringing with it other problems. As the strategy pointed out, by reducing our meat consumption (and livestock numbers) we could improve food security, boost biodiversity, reduce our emissions and take more CO2 out of the atmosphere. We’d also, incidentally, improve our health if we ate less meat.
This is also the approach advised by the Climate Change Committee who advise reducing livestock numbers and meat and dairy consumption to reduce emissions and free up land for carbon sequestration.
The episode also reinforced, in passing, the idea that ‘food miles’ are responsible for the lion’s share of the emissions from food. This is not true as has been pointed out in the work by Our World in Data. It’s what you eat (particularly whether it’s an animal-based food product or not) rather than where you food comes from that’s the greatest determinant of the emissions associated with diets. So bananas from Costa Rica are going to have fewer lifecycle emissions than your average steak from a UK beef herd.
I was slightly disappointed by this episode. Efforts to use UK land to support more biodiversity and sequester carbon were presented as a threat to food security. However, I think there’s a strong argument that the greatest barrier to improved food security – as well as more biodiversity and carbon sequestration – is the current way that we use land. As was pointed out in the Government commissioned National Food Strategy, 85% of UK land is used to feed animals. However, this land produces just 32% of our calories. The 15% of UK land used to grow food crops, on the other hand, produces 68% of our calories. So our current use of land is incredibly inefficient from a food security perspective, as well as bringing with it other problems. As the strategy pointed out, by reducing our meat consumption (and livestock numbers) we could improve food security, boost biodiversity, reduce our emissions and take more CO2 out of the atmosphere. We’d also, incidentally, improve our health if we ate less meat.
This is also the approach advised by the Climate Change Committee who advise reducing livestock numbers and meat and dairy consumption to reduce emissions and free up land for carbon sequestration.
The episode also reinforced, in passing, the idea that ‘food miles’ are responsible for the lion’s share of the emissions from food. This is not true as has been pointed out in the work by Our World in Data. It’s what you eat (particularly whether it’s an animal-based food product or not) rather than where you food comes from that’s the greatest determinant of the emissions associated with diets. So bananas from Costa Rica are going to have fewer lifecycle emissions than your average steak from a UK beef herd.
References
https://www.nationalfoodstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/NFS_Evidence-Pack.pdf
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Thanks Rick. A good set of points well made. Would you be interested to join us next week to discuss? Say Tuesday or Wednesday?