Just to introduce myself, I'm Tara Garnett, the director at Table and a fellow here at the Oxford Martin School.
And I'm joined by three fascinating panellists who are going to introduce in a minute.
And I think each of these panellists is going to bring a different perspective to the livestock question, which is really the point of this evening.
I think everyone here who's going to be listening in on this evening will be aware of
the fact that livestock are implicated in a range of social and environmental problems,
not not least, which of course, is the problem of climate change. But we all also know that the problem the livestock questions are very,
very complex one an example of an issue where there's a ton of evidence out there,
but a lot of contestation of that evidence because of it being different kinds of
evidence from different disciplines based on different scales of observation,
different contexts, different sets of assumptions using different qualities.
And it's an area where scientific understanding is fraught,
contested and and the upshot of this is that the evidence gets pulled and pushed in different directions and
used in all sorts of way to give different answers to the question of what's the livestock problem and what?
What we to do about it. And of course, it's a topic where science into leaves with or is mediated by ethics and values,
different different ways of deciding what to prioritise and different visions of what we actually want.
And. And this really is the purpose of the evening is to try and dig down and explore with through this panel discussion why we hold
the views we do about livestock and why we have different views of what evidence and values we bring to this discussions.
So amongst our panellists, I hope to look at where we disagree, but also what points of commonality we might be able to find.
So before I go any further and introduce the panellists just to say some housekeeping notes,
it's all going to be recorded and they'll be as much time for questions at the end as we can manage.
Given that the shortening, we will still have to finish at 6:30.
But you can can use the Ask a Question button, and you can also vote on the questions that you see in the the highest voting answers will will ask.
So onto the panellists, I'm delighted to introduce a character who is the director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute,
which is a California think tank which takes, let's say,
a positive approach to ways of addressing our environmental problems and also adopt Pablo Manzano from the Basque Centre for Climate Change,
who originally rangeland ecologist who works now to try and understand livestock and that role within a context of this complexity of social,
economic and an ecological variables. And at different temporal and spatial scales.
And finally, Dr Helena Wright, his policy director at Fair Fest,
the world's fastest growing investor network, which is focussing on the environmental,
social and governance risks in the global food sector, particularly those associated with intensive animal agriculture.
So I'm going to ask each of you to to talk just for a couple of minutes where really
I'd like you to just kind of set out your stall in terms of what what you feel,
be the real causes of the livestock problems we face today are and what your visions
of a bad livestock future and a desirable livestock future might look like.
So if you just kind of confine your your remarks to just a couple of minutes and then we we can get going and then open out into a proper discussion?
So Helena, please go ahead first. Right to be high.
So, yeah, as I've mentioned, I'm the policy director of Fair and we are an investor network that supports investors who understand
the risks in the global food system with a particular focus actually on animal agriculture.
So our research really covers the most material issues, such as climate, biodiversity, antibiotics and so on.
And I think in terms of that question of what you see is the the the vision of what the future would look like, say, coming up to 2050.
That's actually a really big issue for investors as well, because a lot of investors have made commitments, say to net zero.
A lot of them are trying to address deforestation as well in the supply chain.
And when we see the sector, there isn't a clear enough roadmap for what we need to see us to get to 2050.
We have seen in other sectors, for example, with the IEA's net zero roadmap,
was very influential and really showing what we need to see by 2050 and kind of outlining for the energy sector.
What would the milestones might need to be for different stakeholders, for different companies?
And that really helped the energy sector to understand the transition that would be needed for 1.5 degrees.
Unfortunately, we don't have any equivalent to that sort of IEA as a roadmap for agriculture and food systems.
At the moment, we don't really have that globally agreed kind of clarity for a central roadmap.
So there are different studies out there sort of showing how we, you know, meet various goals climate, nature, food security,
but people are not sort of putting those goals together and looking across multiple sustainable development goals.
And that's really what's needed, I think, because there's a lot of different trade-offs. We know that the demand for protein is growing.
We know that the demand for land is growing and all of these different pressures will be increasing over the next decades.
So I think what we need is greater clarity to how to reconcile these multiple issues,
sustainability risks and the planetary boundaries that we face by planetary boundaries,
on land, on pesticide use,
etc. We're not sort of meeting the goals that moment that would lead us to a more sustainable world that would actually be sustainable for the future.
So yes, when you investors have mentioned that we need a clearer roadmap,
and that would probably be some combination of regenerative approaches for agriculture,
some combination of diet shifts, including alternative and plant based protein sources,
and then some combination of intensification in the mix as well different pathways.
And we need more clarity on what that looks like. So, yeah, I'll stop there.
Thank you, Helen. I'm Dan. Would you like to go next?
Thank you. As you introduced and then readyto I'm the director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute,
and I like to zoom out a little bit to talk about those other stages, actually that Helen mentions.
Livestock is not just an environmental problem, it's also interwoven with a bunch of human development problems.
There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who get much of their income and livelihoods from raising livestock,
as well as certainly billions who rely on meat, milk and other products for protein, calories, micronutrients and other elements of nutrition.
Although I think it's really easy to kind of have a very kind of western perspective and the focus on the US where I am in the UK,
where I think if you are. Many people around the world, like an estimated Billing billion or so, do suffer from protein deficiencies,
and so there's a real case to be made that we do need more access to livestock products.
Much of the world, as well as as Helen mentioned,
probably less and less meat consumption in places like the US or we consume far above the global average.
But I think, you know, in addition to this human is human problems that we face on the environmental side, of course.
Livestock contributes something on the order of 14 to 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
We can quibble over the numbers, but it's a substantial amount and of course,
contribute to dramatic land use conversion from forests to pasture and crop land, as well as a number of other impacts.
I think. We probably intuitively understand many of the drivers of the root causes of this sort of global population as large demand has been rising.
Meet demand has doubled or so since 1960 per capita.
But one element I think that's often lost is something that Helen that alluded to,
which is the low productivity of livestock, agriculture and many parts of the world in many places,
the yields per cow and the environmental impacts per cow or per kilogram of beef are much larger five times
or ten times larger than they are and much of the western world and then the highest productivity countries.
So what I would really emphasise is that need to intensify livestock agriculture more in the coming decades.
So that's the lowest productivity places can raise yields, not just reducing environmental impacts, but also providing more access to protein,
greater profits for livestock producers and otherwise helping enhance both human welfare as well as environmental welfare.
Thank you, Don Pablo. Over to you, I suspect you might offer a slightly different take on the issues.
Yes. Thank you. Well, I'm Carol Manzano. I'm an ecologist working at the Centre of Climate Change for Climate Change and BBC3.
And I think my perspective is pretty much oriented by my college's background when we analyse the grazing
systems in the world and I am specialised in crazy systems both by whales and by domestic livestock,
we can see that in in Europe and in the states.
I mean, many developed countries, particularly, we have a lack of herbivore that is causing a lot of environmental problems.
And I think that's very descriptive of the evolution that the livestock sector has had in
the last decades and where we detect both a decrease in the mobility of of livestock,
which has contributed a lot to the decrease in the productivity of the systems.
And they don't imitate anymore the wild how people are systems with a certain degree of mobility that basically follow the productivity of the plants,
but just stay sedentary and and food has to be brought to them. And also, we detect an increasing industrialisation of the production.
And I think that causes artefacts in the data that many people made sort of in a wrong way.
And for example, much of the of the footprint that is attributed to to livestock like, you know, they're these number from fouled.
That piece, quoted very often of their fourteen point five percent of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions triggered by livestock,
should be nuanced because it is not being accounted that in many of the marginal lands that Dan
was just talking about that are perceived to be really unproductive or of low productivity.
These are lands that cannot be used for for any other use that can just be used by
Glasto because they took a small band for it somewhere in the centre of the Sahara.
You can use livestock to graze on the annual plants that grow there.
When one of these rains that happens every seven years happen because you just
think that livestock there and you cannot do that with plants and seeds,
of course, because they're sessile organisms there, they are not mobile. So it means in all of this, it means that for me,
the crises of all of the livestock sector right now is very much linked to an industrialisation that with us,
with so many other aspects of our current life, is really a drug addict off of fossil fuels.
And we are not going back to these livestock practises that depend less on fossil fuels and that
our ecological ecological proxies or ecological analogies to what wild herbivores would do.
And also we have to look at their palaeontology. We know that for the last 12 to 15 million years,
everybody has been a force shaping ecosystems all over the world and only in the in the last tens of thousands of years.
We have lost most of the herbivores worldwide, and there are processes triggered by humans like, for example,
burning by hunter-gatherers or also the landscape management that pastoralists do that substitute these functions.
So we have the absurd now the absurd situation know that, for example,
in Europe and where you have a loss of biodiversity because you lose on the open ecosystems.
Yet you are arguing about the high environmental footprint in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions of those herbivores that we are losing and that we shouldn't lose anymore.
And whose methane, for example, would be emitted either by deer or or also by wild fires that we are having both in California,
in Australia and the Mediterranean. Thank you, I mean, Dan, would you like to to come back on that?
I mean, I'm seeing a sort of slightly different set of visions,
and I'm wondering whether this is because of different contexts or whether it's
just fundamentally different ideas of what the priorities of the food system,
different kinds of metrics. And I think also we haven't quite defined intensification and industrialisation.
So perhaps you can start by offering your definition of that and and then and then come back up, Pablo.
And also what you agree with him about, as well as what you disagree with him?
Certainly. So I think it is really important to understand that livestock intensification is not the
same necessarily as industrialisation and its livestock contents can be intensified.
Livestock production can be intensified without necessarily mirroring the confined animal feeding operations or
sometimes called factory farms or by activists that we have in the US and in much of the industrialised world.
Intensification can include many different things that enhance the amount of production per hectare or per animal mean pasture management.
I mean, as Pablo was saying, really trying to align the grazing patterns of animals with the productivity of the ecosystem,
with the productivity of the forages and grasses so that it's really optimally used can also mean providing more crop based feeds to animals.
I think that's an area we will probably disagree.
But grain based or corn soy based feeds can provide much more energy to animals and help them basically gain weight quicker.
And intensification can also mean things that we all want to see,
such as better veterinary care and better reproductive health so that animals get sick less often.
The fewer calves are lost during basically birthing, so that overall as much of the energy really going into the system ends up going out as meat,
as milk and other products that people want to produce.
These benefits that we see an intensification, I think, are also seen with kapos.
And I think that's a very uncomfortable point that there are some environmental benefits, certainly with the small industrialised,
energy intensive and fossil fuel dependent system certainly shifting over to grain based,
more confined operations reduces overall land use, although it does involve smaller crop land use.
Definitely, it reduces the pressure on pasture, the pressure to increase pasture land into other forests or other types of vegetation.
And by almost every study I've seen, it reduces the amount of total greenhouse gas emissions per pound, the fee for per pound of milk.
There are definite trade-offs, though. I. I personally go back and forth over whether I value the environmental benefits of
those more than I value the animal welfare benefits of more grass fed systems.
And certainly there are human labour trade-offs as well,
where workers and meat processing plants and workers on feedlots are not necessarily treated very well.
So I don't think there's any silver bullet necessarily or a one size fits all solution.
I think these are trade offs that people will make depending on their values and depending on the local priorities,
some places are intensifying to the level.
OK, so it may make sense. Another very well may not.
But that all said, I do want to just emphasise a couple of points Pablo made because I think they're really important and people often downplay them.
So one is this issue of methane emissions from wildlife.
I think it's definitely true that if we remove cattle or sheep or other livestock from
an ecosystem and restore it to some past version of that ecosystem with wildlife,
there will be some amount of methane emissions from those animals as well from deer, from bison.
Every estimate I've seen suggests that it's substantially smaller.
That level of emissions. But it does certainly offset a part of the greenhouse gas benefits that we might imagine.
So and. I guess just one last point.
Maybe we kind of all perhaps disagree to some amount is the role of grass fed.
Production systems, I think that certainly, as Pablo mentioned, grazing cattle on on pasture and forage lands in rangelands can be really important.
At the same time, the level with growing meat demand and extremely high level of commitment we have in some places,
we just simply won't be able to meet existing demand exclusively with grass fed systems that would substantially increase meat prices.
It's certainly true in the US, so know it's like in the UK, but that's a real trade off we have to grapple with.
Thanks, Dan. I think that that's almost starting to be drawn into a discussion about a consumption side things,
but let's bring in Helena first because I mean, I think you.
Yeah, I mean, Pablo comes from a quite a sort of bottom up perspective involving people who may or may.
It may not be so closely connected to the kind of global financial system,
whereas you you look at this from a very, very macro scale, looking at working with your investors.
And I'm going to think in a way you've kind of straddled both Pablo.
And then insofar as Dan's vision of the kind of the cafe and the intensification as a way to go is something
that you are highlighting as a kind of right with a whole load of risks on one hand and on the other.
Pablo's vision of a sort of smaller scale agro ecological approach is perhaps not within the purview, if you will, of the people that you work with.
But I'm putting words into your mouth, so perhaps you could comment on that.
Yeah, I was really interesting debate, and I think just actually first off, I just want to say that, you know,
we need to draw a huge distinction between the huge industrial phase that we see in and tests of livestock
production primarily going to the rich sort of global north consumption level and the smallholders,
which are, you know, primarily sort of tending to their livelihoods and in fact most vulnerable to
the impacts of climate change rather than causing climate change themselves.
So I think just to put that that The Lancet report, you know, provides a science based approach that says that in the global North,
actually, the animal protein consumption is too high and we need to be reduced to meet planetary boundaries.
Whereas in the global south, in many places, there may be room to increase that.
So just to put that out at the beginning,
I wanted to touch on some of the issues that Dan had raised actually most distinctly and kind of offer a perspective.
One is the greenhouse gas efficiency per unit, which has been used as a variable.
But I think from the investor perspective, you really cannot just look at greenhouse gases.
That's extremely important because if you only look from a carbon perspective, you could lead to very perverse incentives, say, for biodiversity,
for antibiotics and for a whole other host level of risks if you were to intensify production, only focussing on greenhouse gas per unit.
Secondly, it hasn't worked very well for the fossil fuel sector, so there's a parallel efficiency of fossil fuel extraction,
obviously, was something that the fossil fuel industrial sector promoted a lot, thinking that that would reduce emissions.
But the efficiency of fossil fuel per unit obviously leads to greater use of fossil fuels and greater extraction.
So I would say fundamentally, that is a parallel, but we need to draw and perhaps we need more research on that.
I think we don't have enough information about how greenhouse gas efficiency per unit may not reduce global emissions.
If you look at it from a livestock perspective, as well as other ESG risks involved,
so that could be an interesting area for future research in how the perverse incentives could occur.
And then another issue is that you mentioned using less land and some of the most intensive systems.
But actually, I mean, I think there's an issue there of the animal feed production,
which goes into that because you have per land unit, it may be if animals are more intensively produced, they would use less land.
But as we know, biodiversity is a huge issue, and office sort of research shows that a huge number of the protein producers,
over 70 percent are not tracking whether they are causing deforestation down the supply chain.
So we don't have the data, unfortunately,
and we literally don't have the data to know about the animal feed and how that could be causing deforestation.
As we know that, you know, huge amounts of global soya production,
around 70 percent goes to livestock and we don't know, you know, how that's causing deforestation.
So we are lacking the data to understand these issues as well.
And the final passage, just like to mention looking from an investor perspective,
you can really reduce a whole host of risks by looking more into diversification into sustainable protein.
And that is something that now a lot of companies are doing in a lot of investors are looking at.
And that means plant based meat alternative products, which primarily feed that, you know,
the growing demand levels and alternative protein consuming sort of very simple products ranging from,
you know, bean baggers, lentil burgers, etc. to more kind of processed products.
But whichever products they are, they. You have a range of environmental benefits, actually, because they reduce not just climate risk,
but also biodiversity risk, antibiotic risk, land use, et cetera.
So I think there is a role for that in a lot of companies without even the large sort of protein producers are looking at that issue,
although we haven't seen a enough awareness of policymakers right now.
So policy is the third sort of point that I would like to raise. Intensive systems that we have a hugely reliance on agricultural subsidies.
So while they may look efficient, they actually are economically inefficient and sort of inefficient way to produce protein.
So that is an area which I think may require understanding and greater information.
Thank you, Pablo. Mean, I just was hoping you would kind respond to help us.
On the one hand, we have this this concept of the alternative, more sustainable protein,
which is often the focus of investment by these big large scale heifer linked animal protein
producers who are the kind of the antithesis of of the systems that you're promoting.
So I'm just wondering what your take is on this,
and I think you'll first be quite useful to kind of zoom out into a larger discussion about what we mean by dietary change,
its its potentials and the limitations. Yeah, well, I wanted to agree with Cheryl now that the policy's actually around how the private sector acts.
And that's very important, and I think even if more could be done from the state of policy,
the fact that these initiatives for four alternative protein sources and countries meet
and all that stuff comes into place is also from from the demand of the consumers,
all a firm, the demand of policy makers.
And I also wanted to agreed with then that intensification in general a in in many aspects is something good and the fact that,
for example, less carbs and less lands die now that 100 years ago, which is a way of intensification.
Of course, that's that's good for for providing more food for for providing more protein for people that, for example.
But I've worked 10 years in Africa and I I know that half of the African population
is considered to be stunted because of insufficient access to animal source foods.
So it's a big issue.
But I think here what we have is a set of assumptions that even if they are in the mainstream, I consider them to be wrong, directly wrong.
And, for example, a land use change. And this is an aspect that that you both have mentioned.
It is considered that any land use by livestock is land use by humans, and therefore it's land that is negatively used.
However, from the side of the ecology and from the side of the evidence from from biodiversity,
we know that for grazed ecosystems we are basically all except for rainforests.
At least since 15 million years ago, and a moderate herbivore mediated either by wild herbivores or by domestic herbivores is positive.
It's not neutral. It's positive in terms of ecosystem function and in terms of and in terms of biodiversity.
However, it is also very important to define how it is used.
Of course, it's not the same.
If you have a herd of cows grazing all year long being in grass lawn because it will be the same as if you are mowing your grass every day,
of course you will kill the plants.
You will need to graze them and then let them rest and then graze them again and let them breathe, just as you would do in your garden lawn.
It's the same, and then you would produce a landscape,
which is the natural landscape that we would have observe, see in the in the last interglacial in the union,
which have a similar climate as us now, but with way more herbivores all over the place where we would have a mixture of trees,
shrubs and a lot of grass, much more of them than we imagined.
And I think that's the misconception that outside the small world of the vegetation
ecology is that they belong to is a massively misunderstood in the world,
for example, the Cerrado or the charcoal, which I happen to,
to have been working with communities in the Takot region, in South America and for the last 10 years.
It is interpreted that is the latter that is deforested to tackle,
but actually it is a love storekeepers in the Tekle that are uniting themselves against the foresters, which guess what are the grain producers,
the soybean producers and the main producers that they're actually not really triggering our deforestation,
as we imagine of a closed for is that turns into a pasture,
but rather as savanna and the charcoal on the Cerrado are described as savanna already by Enrico, all heading in 1984.
It's turning that into a cropland, and it's a cropland to, well, to produce soybean oil, which is used mainly for human production,
but with a very valuable product,
which is the soy soybean cake which is fed to basically mono gas that is not to ruminants, but to chicken and to pork.
So it's these grain friction that makes these intensification possible,
that it's actually creating a lot of of this land use change, negative land use change.
And also, you mention, well, you mentioned also the existing demand that we have to cope with the existing existing demand.
A, in my opinion, that shouldn't be an issue because, you know,
I think we should aim to produce as sustainable as possible and then we should
just adjust the demand to the offer that we have on sustainable production,
which I believe is much more than we think because of the reasons that I that I am highlighting in in this talk am, and I would say, very important.
Issue that you mentioned is that all the estimates that you have for it, I'm sure you are.
You are right that you have read all these estimates and say that there is much more livestock than than wild herbivores that should be.
But these are very interesting. Interesting study. Interesting subject that they happen.
Also to know personally because I know the persons implicated in that.
This was formulated by Anthony Barnosky in a publication in PNAS in 2008, and a friend of Dr. Barnosky happens to be a collaborator of mine.
The University of Helsinki would have preferred that postdoc during the last two years, and he told me that Barnosky thought about that.
It was just a calculation on the back of an envelope to trigger the debate.
But unfortunately, there has been no debate, so people have just taken the numbers that Barnosky published on PNAS.
And and they haven't they haven't discussed it further.
For example, the revelation that Byron Italian piano years and three years ago that they published,
they just took directly the numbers from from Barnosky,
and they have a paper submitted now that hopefully will be published soon when
I contest these numbers with some newer numbers that have been published.
But for example, you have a very recent publication in Journal of Applied Ecology, the first author and the good with Danish names.
But it's like flop card or something like that. But it's from the lab of author Dr Spending, who is very known for for these things against sending,
and they have actually seen what their natural or the seemingly natural densities of herbivores are in protected areas in all, in all the continents.
And even if it's a not very fine word because they have done global work and they have taken just the data that they put,
they show that in Africa and in Asia where you have complete yields of caregivers,
you have elephants, you have lots of antelopes, you have browsers,
you have razors and not only browsers because in Europe and in the states, we have lost most of the grazers.
We only have browsers and you have really high densities of of herbivores, really high, I mean, much more than than what we are imagining now.
And it's true that in other continents, these densities are lower,
but it's also true that in other continents, the animals are not able to migrate as they used to.
And I am personally doing our research right now in Spain on that and in Spain,
we are having really troubles to find a natural and protected area where we can observed migration because,
you know, as all developed countries, it is so fragmented by roads, by crop plants, et cetera, that it's impossible to have a Serengeti.
So to say OK. But we have a national park in central Spain,
where it's because of the alignment of the mountain ranges and also because it used to be a hunting area.
So they reserve some very productive area, not for croplands, but to have animals there where we observe these kind of migrations.
And even if we are talking just about Red Deer because we have lost all, all that grazers and the Red Deer are browsers,
we are observing a density of fear that is about half what we would get in an extensive livestock system.
OK. So thanks. Yeah. So not just just a last point.
Sorry, Tara, sorry. I also wanted to say that and in my experience in Africa, also,
development agencies are not very realistic in terms of implementing castles in in rural areas in Africa,
for example, because it's also not understood that the communities there cannot enter capital intensive economic strategies.
And this is also from the social point of view. It's also an advantage of the extensive livestock systems that they are not capital intensive.
Certainly thank you,
I'm I'm mindful of time and that we we we started a little bit late and I'd also like to move on to the discussion of the cop and the needs,
the needs for the for the future cop. But before doing so,
I'd just like to kind of go back to this question of consumption and trying to link it a little bit more with with with values as
well and with what we as kind of individuals or as as researchers feel to be a good system and a good future and a feasible future.
So just so one of the one of the points that was the obvious point is that, you know,
our population globally is now largely urban and it's going to be more and more urban over over, over time.
And and I think we have to several kind of some visions going on here.
One is to be very, very crude about it, which is that people want to eat meat, give them cleaner meat.
Another another vision is people want to eat meat, give them decent substitutes and a third vision,
which was if people want meat, it's right and proper.
But that appetite should adjust to the kind of ecological kind of carrying capacity.
And I think those are kind of the very common sets of discussions that that we have never quite resolved.
But have I understood you correctly and and in terms of how how that fits into policymaking
and into ideas about what a way forward is and what's both desirable and what's feasible?
I would be really, really interested if you could, if you could reflect upon this, not just from the perspective of the evidence you marshal,
but also about your own personal visions of what you would like things to be like
going forward and how how far removed that is from what you see to be likely.
So who would like to go first? Dan, go ahead.
I can jump in briefly, I think from my perspective,
what matters most with regard to consumption is how policies are really designed
or how efforts are designed to change other people's consumption behaviour.
I think that the actual point of intervention, whether it's a subsidy or a tax or mandate or regulation or educational campaign,
that that to me is really the crux of the issue. More so than what ultimate level of consumption are trying to achieve.
And from my perspective, what there seems to be the most interesting and really strong evidence for
from what we've learnt from trying to cut greenhouse gas emissions and improve
environmental impacts and other sectors really seems important is to really try to
make low carbon or really clean meat cheap to make more sustainable meat cheap,
whether that's animal based or plant based, whether that's grass fed or not.
Ultimately, I think any effort that is focussed on making products more expensive, taxing it or mandating some maximum level of consumption.
Banning meat on Fridays, for instance, or something along those lines is going to inevitably run into really insurmountable political obstacles.
And in both countries, perhaps not at all. But I think in most in most European countries, as well as in the US.
And I think that political element is something that we need to take really seriously because ultimately we don't want to pursue.
I think pipe dreams for policies that may, on paper on a spreadsheet seem optimal,
but ultimately in the public sphere are not going to get the time of day.
Thank you, Helena. Would you like to come in? Yeah, I think, yeah, this is a really interesting discussion, but yeah, I agree.
I think it's probably some kind of version of that.
But I would say that in terms of that definition of clean, clean meat,
that's not really sort of terminology that I'm familiar with in terms of a sort of definition.
But I do think what we're seeing is a kind of diversification into the known animal protein as a way to reduce risk.
And I do think there is a role also for the regenerative agricultural systems as well because we've
seen obviously various studies and Pablo mentioned some of them in the more extensive systems.
There is obviously benefits there, but there's a big difference between the extensive and the intensive systems.
The only issue with some of the focus now on regenerative agriculture, which has been kind of, you know,
held up, lost and pushed within the policy space is that that does actually use a lot more land as well.
So be brownfield et also study and others kind of show that the land intensity of the regenerative agricultural systems is higher.
So it's not sort of a silver bullet solution, which people can promote essentially for those reasons.
So I think in that case, it is definitely a combination of the two.
And what was quite interesting was, I thought the UK's National Food Strategy, which I see was a proposal which hasn't been accepted into policy,
but that had sort of around sort of one third of some alternative proteins of around a third of regenerative agriculture and some intensification.
And then so the combination of the three areas seems to have a lot of understanding of the different trade-offs between climate,
biodiversity and so on.
But I mean, within that system, there's a radical transformation needed to get to the system where we are now to a more sustainable system.
But yeah. And so I'm going to come back to you on that because I think that will lead very well onto the cop.
But I mean, I think I think Pablo, perhaps you could you could offer your response,
but also sort of tie it into what you feel is needed in the next few months as we move towards COP 27.
And also what you feel the role to be of the different kind of stakeholders,
from sort of policymakers to civil society to industry and in thinking about how to move forward.
Yeah, I wanted to reflect on the on demand point because I think the fact that prices go up,
meat prices go up a wee bit for sustainable meat or sustainable animal products.
Milliken and others is not necessarily bad because we have a crisis worldwide and
not only in developed countries where we have a massive problem of the population,
but also in developing countries. A for for the prices paid for, for to my criterion.
Sustainable production of animal products, which involves plastics and many of them, by the way,
doing regenerative grazing without knowing because that's that's more of a thing of of developed countries and the consideration.
I mean, whereas the techniques are pretty common, it's adaptive grazing, et cetera.
I don't think it's really a problem that the prices go up.
As long as in the in the in the states, in the in the different countries,
we have redistribution mechanisms that allow poor people to access to to an a healthy level of animal source products of of sustainable origin.
But an increase in prices is something that would contribute to reduce poverty in very marginal areas that have no other options,
both of human development and of livelihoods,
and that are now experiencing a crisis because of the unfair competition by more industrial and waste off of production that actually achieve cheap,
cheap products that are made available everywhere through globalisation and that push them out of some of their economic sustainability,
I would say, on their social sustainability.
And much of it expense a lot of the crises that we are seeing, you know, even even related to to maybe your think I am essential rating,
but this is also an area that I am working on right now and the whole crisis on terrorism in the Sahel
and all the problems of of insecurity are pretty much related with a lack of access to social services
and lack of getting enough income in these communities and usually them then move towards violence
and towards insecurities triggered by these insufficient income that may maybe not lead to hunger,
but leads to social crises like inside their communities to access marriage and other things.
So I do think that we have Win-Win solutions in this field.
But in that sense, and concretely on the question that you ask Tara, what I would like the cop to do to host is a revision,
a revision on how these impacts are evaluated so that sustainable livestock systems are better evaluated.
Because I think right now it's not done in a multisectoral way, it's not done in a multidisciplinary way.
And it's not, you know, nobody is considering the there the factors that I am discussing here.
And that may cause policy actions and an evolution of the sector that may be counter producing for for tackling climate change.
So that's that's something that the IPCC and not so far the parties of the COP should take really seriously,
and they're not taking it seriously right now. And that worries me.
That worries me a lot. Thank you.
At that time, would you what would your be or your sort of wish list for the cop and how, how, how, how different or how similar is it?
I mean, what do you agree with that, the public said.
And what would you add or challenge?
So on the note of the next cop, I said there are a number of successes from the previous one that can be built upon.
So we've got twenty six or really right around it, a number of countries,
I believe 30 or so signed on together to commit more funding to research and development and agriculture to help with climate smart innovation.
And I think there are a number of areas and livestock production where we could substantially reduce environmental impacts,
in particular methane emissions from industrialised systems in the U.S. and U.K. and Western Europe and elsewhere through new technologies,
through things like feed additives or supplements that reduce the methane that come out of from cow burps.
There are potentially vaccines that can be developed to reduce methane emissions and their breeding programmes.
There's a huge need here for more research. And particularly, you know, that's true outside of industrialised countries as well.
We talked about the importance of intensification.
A lot of that comes from improved research, applied research, as well as education and extension programmes.
So I would love to see a huge ramp up in funding commitments for something like that.
That's probably the primary thing there.
I think I to clarify something that perhaps problem I seem to disagree about,
which is this role of prices certainly think that higher livestock prices that are
really market driven are certainly really beneficial for livestock producers.
That's true really throughout agriculture. It's true for crop industries as well.
But I do think that artificially applied increases the price,
whether it's a tax on the consumer and that retail or a tax at the supplier, for instance.
People are throwing around the idea of like a carbon tax.
Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture that unnecessarily places financial burden on producers.
It doesn't necessarily increase the market price that they're getting. So that's a real differentiation I want to make clear.
And similarly, really try and make these products cheaper.
I think a lot of it can come from providing financial support for producers to adopt Evidence-Based environmentally beneficial practises,
whether in some cases that's more regenerative grazing or adaptive management goes by many different names or whether it's it's food additives,
imagine that sometimes called d-bergen pills that cut the methane emissions from cows.
Thank you, thank you. And, Helena, I mean, I think you must be really sort of gearing up.
So what what's on your your wish list and what do you feel the role of investors is in in trying to shift towards a more sort of sustainable fit?
Yeah. So I think it was really interesting to see at the last cop 26, actually, fossil fuels really came to the fore.
And also fossil fuel subsidies, as well as an important issue that a lot of governments have focussed on.
And I think what could be interesting now is agricultural subsidies to receive similar way to actually,
there's been a lot of discussion showing how many subsidies there are globally and how negative they are for biodiversity,
etc. I think that would be quite a big topic,
and some of our investors recently also signed a statement calling on the EU to better align its agricultural subsidies with both climate and nature,
since the investors are trying to kind of meet their own goals.
But they cannot do this without policy actions of actually putting the right measures in place to flow towards a more sustainable system.
So that would be interesting to see that receiving a similar weight as it is,
we have more than 400 billion agricultural subsidies and the UN set for these reports, saying how unsustainable most of these subsidies are.
So I think that are primarily a lot of these subsidies artificially lowering the prices of the more unsustainable products.
So they're almost going to the opposite of what we need to see actually right now.
So perhaps that's something we could we could all agree. And the other question I would like to raise is, you know, this intensification as well.
I think as Pablo mentioned, there's been a lot of use of sort of public funds,
including development funds, with the assumption that intensification would create a better system.
Sometimes it has also displaced livelihoods and jobs, as well as creating, you know, products.
So I think there's a big difference between the producers and the consumers and in
terms of the methane topping just slightly different perspective there as well.
I think that, you know, obviously some of these solutions,
which are kind of within the same system of sort of incremental solutions, can also lower methane emissions as well.
But I would also say that another way to reduce methane emissions is a more kind of systemic solution, such as a shift to more plant rich,
sustainable protein diversification within portfolios, because that is another way that will fundamentally reduce methane emissions as well.
So it will be really interesting to see how the methane pledges are taken forwards.
At the moment, only energy has received attention really within the methane debate hardly hardly a word in about agricultural methane.
Even though, as the IEA released this week, agriculture is the largest source of methane emissions globally.
So I think that's going to have to be more focussed on that if we're going to reach 1.5 goal.
Yeah, I'll leave it there. Thank you.
I'm very mindful of the fact that we've got we've got a pile of questions that from the audience and and I'd like to come on to this in a minute.
But before I do that, I think it would be really helpful for each of you to kind of take stock and say,
Is there anything that you've heard from the other speakers that has that either you agree with or that has modified your your opinion?
And where do you feel kind of further entrenched in your in your in your viewpoints?
Or where do you where do you continue to disagree? I would just like to try to get you to kind of reach across and say, what?
What have you heard where you may have nuanced your your point of view?
I mean, who would like to take off first? And if you haven't changed your mind at all, then that's that's very predictable.
But you know. I'd probably have to thought, yeah, one, I did kind of agree with the point from Dan better animal welfare is the kind of win win.
So I guess from that is like what we define as welfare because it seems to reduce emissions.
So that would be sort of, well, what we define in that within that term.
And then I is also very much agree with Pablo mentioning that the food security issue is a security issue as well broadly more than just a food issue.
And I think that's really important to consider because a lot of investors are understanding the
financial stability risks related to the unsustainable food system and how it affects them.
Loads of different issues. But I think not enough.
Policymakers are aware of how foods sustain unsustainable issues are a severe financial stability risk, as well as a security risk.
You can't Pablo have you. How about you?
Yeah. I mean, not not that I've changed my my mind, but I have changed my perception, maybe on the arguments of intensification,
because I'm happy that when people talk about intensification, they they talk about improvement in production that involves, you know,
real real improvements we've seen within our food system and not switching to to a more industrial or to a more confined
system like what we were discussing about improving rains and soil management or or about improve veterinary care,
et cetera. And I also I'm I'm happy to see that that we also agree on, you know, on the shortcomings of, for example,
subsidies that are very often oriented to productivity and disease, even if there is a change in it.
But it's a very slow change in the Common Agricultural Policy and from productivity that has actually stimulated more,
more industrial ways of producing towards towards more environmental aspects.
And I think that's that's that's good, you know. And ultimately,
I think also that the hike in fossil fuel prices that we are going to see because of scarcity of fossil fuels is also going to put things in place,
you know, and he's going to make fossil fuel intense animal production more expensive
than the waste of animal production that are more that are less dependent on.
However, I must continue to disagree on on the strategies for for reducing methane emissions in the country because it's not only
that most of the methane is produced by the most extensive protections that there are more similar to wild herbivores.
But it is also on, and we tend to forget completely that global warming is not only greenhouse gas,
greenhouse gases and greenhouse gas effect from from the gases, but it's also an albino element.
And there is also a comprehensive literature showing that the switch from savannahs to forests in subtropical
areas not the interpretive areas but in subtropical areas and also in more temperate and boreal areas,
is going to cause a change in the albedo on the negative things in the air in terms of absorbing more energy.
And it is likely to worsen climate change. So, yeah, I keep on being pretty convinced that we shouldn't touch the castrati systems.
OK, well then how about you? Give your last words and then and then we'll move on to questions how many we can squeeze in.
Sure. I'm increasingly I'm increasingly convinced by the public's perspective and a perspective about the ecological benefits of grazing,
I remain very content to hold very strong beliefs that there are many problems caused by poor grazing around the world,
and I think that can often be lost when we talk about grazing has been beneficial.
I think we need to be really nuanced and specific in this discussion, these discussions.
And also, I absolutely agree both with Helena and Panopto about what they would like to see in the next call.
I think we really do need to see a lot more of a lot more analysis about the role of agriculture and methane emissions,
but also for that analysis to be to really take seriously these critiques that Panopto and
others are making about the total system wide effects of removing livestock from the landscape.
How much of those emissions might be replaced by wildlife emissions?
What will be the effects on ecosystems on soil carbon on albedo, though those are all really important to consider,
and I wouldn't want to see countries make decisions about how to meet their methane
pledge through agriculture without really taking that more holistic approach.
Well, thank you. Thank you for that. So just some questions. I think we've got I mean, there's a ton of questions here.
One of them is, I think I think it's actually been more or less addressed, but so perhaps you could be very quick about it.
But beef tends to grab most of the attention discussion of environmental impacts.
But could speakers comment on what they see as other livestock? Sheep, goats, pigs, poultry in a sustainable future food system?
Yeah, I mean, Pablo, could you say something about the poultry issue?
Because I know, you know, you know, there is this kind of depending on who you talk to poultry good or poultry bad, depending on which metric you use.
Do you see a positive role for poultry and pig production?
Well, rescuing the last comment done, I think it is important to to new ones have a discourse,
and I don't think on grazing livestock is good because it depends on how you manage that grazing livestock.
Definitely. And that's I'm happy to see that this is part of the intensification to manage it better.
And with poultry, it's the same with poultry or with pigs.
Because in my mind, the big distinction is between mono gas thinks that these pigs and poultry and and ruminants,
which is goats, sheep and cows, yaks and camels, etcetera.
And I think both peaks and unfaltering have a tremendous potential and also some, some some fish cultures in recycling waste.
And we shouldn't forget that. And I am also personally working on pastorally system based on pigs,
which are the great forgotten side of barzagli systems you should link to, for example.
Also a paper on that. But regarding the the chicken, I think they are.
On the contrary, I think they are very useful at the at the backyard level to, you know, to use ways to increase circularity of of of the economy.
And that should not be that that should not be forgotten.
However, when you enter into a dynamic of more industrial facilities, this is where the problem started.
Also, because of a matter of density of waste, of of I mean of of excreta of there of the chicken, you know,
and when you have what what we talk about in our research group are livestock keeping that is linked to the territory,
no matter if it's ruminants or if it's more restricts. Usually the environmental impacts are much less.
And I think the link to the territory would also include ways of raising poultry and peaks that take advantage of the
waste and that that do not produce humongous quantities of of animals that will cause a lot of problems with the excreta.
As we are seeing right now in many countries, especially, I think for pigs, but also poultry is a problem for that.
Thank you. And I have a question here that is probably well addressed to to Helena.
Actually, it's about it goes like this.
Some of the plant based foods are high and high in fat, sugar and salt and highly processed and not in line with the healthy, sustainable diet.
So what how do you see this fitting into the way that the goal of shifting towards sustainable
proteins where there may be a trade off between the sort of the carbon footprint,
however, you might want to measure that and on the health agenda.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point that needs further research, actually as well, because I mean,
there is a wide range of different definitions of the non, you know, an animal protein products, a really, really wide range.
So it could mean anything to protein could really mean anything from sort of lentil or
bean bag is very simple right away to to a more processed or more salt intensive product.
So I think there is a role for the investors to call for better nutrition as well in the products
that are being produced and to make sure that the nutritional aspect is looked at as well.
Because obviously, what a lot of companies are doing is just responding to consumer demands and everybody likes the taste of salt, you know?
And so I think that's an interesting point. But we also know that a lot of processed meat products are also linked to health issues as well.
So if it's sort of replacing one with another, I'm not sure, you know, actually, it could be beneficial as well.
So it's very complex. And I would say that it requires a little more research in terms of improving the products that are being produced
at the moment and making sure that nutritional wins games as well as the department wins the game as well.
And do you think that within within the investment sector is health?
Is nutritional health seen at all as an issue to be that that is associated with risk?
Definitely rising up the agenda, definitely, because it's become a lot more on the agenda and the focus is there.
So I think a lot of these new ESG frameworks now have been developed for the new products.
What is happening is there's a lot of new products coming to market and sometimes you know, it's harder for the data to be made available as well.
So I think we'll see an increased focus on that as the sector develops.
Really? Thank you. I have a general question.
I don't know who wants to pick this one up. Cop, 27, is built by Egypt as the Africa cop.
Please could speakers comment on the different challenges in achieving sustainability,
facing livestock farmers in developing countries and industrial economies.
I mean, I think we touched upon this in our conversation just now, but but perhaps you could expand on it a bit.
Would you like to go? I think.
I'll say I'll make a comment. I'm really curious to hear a couple of us say about this, given his experience working in Africa.
I have not worked in Africa.
But based on my my work, one of the top challenges and really opportunities is really investing in agricultural productivity and much of Africa.
There are some countries, certainly South Africa in particular, that have, ah, they have highly developed highly productive agricultural systems.
But in many, many parts of the continent, there are a very large yield gaps between what farmers could be producing,
what they currently are due to limited availability of fertilisers and irrigation and water.
Likewise, in livestock, there's a lot of potential to substantially increase productivity.
I think one aspect of this, too, that's really important to consider is how to really future proof these agricultural production systems,
how to make sure that the changes that countries and companies and other people are
investing in today help people become more resilient to the projected increases in warming,
changes in water availability changes and pest pressures.
Yeah, I agree with you that and I think Africa also has an immense challenge in terms of population
pressure because it has to keep a lot of food to a lot of people that are coming because it has very,
very high fertility rates and it also has a lot to a lot of weight to go in terms of
improvements in terms of of the what I consider the good side of of intensification.
Because since the independence of most of African countries in the 60s, you can trace the extension services,
how they have been falling apart basically, and how there has not been enough investment in that.
And there is a huge need of investment in in those extension services.
I think it's not necessary to switch that the production systems,
the local production systems from the agricultural systems that are dominating, knowing to more industrial ones.
I don't think at all that this is necessary, but they do need a lot of of extension services much more than now.
And it's also interesting to live in Africa to see how the new technologies are expanding very fast, for example, with mobile phones.
And to see what the immense potential it would be, for example, for for pastoralists again,
to provide them with extension services to measure some some parameters of the animals by remote means and that nobody is doing that so far.
This is is a little bit sad. You know, so I think there is a lot of potential,
but also probably African governments need to listen much more to what is happening within the communities themselves
because there is a lot of innovation going on and that very often gets captured because nobody is listening to it.
What kind of innovation?
Well, for example, I don't know if you can do that in Great Britain, but in Spain you can already pay with the mobile phone, in shops and so on.
Well, this is a Kenyan invention. This started with M-Pesa.
Mobile perceptive sun means money in Swahili. And this was a Kenyan guy that came with the idea because they were sending airtime to to remote family
members in the countryside and just to pay for things and an informal economy dependent on that.
So they formalised that thing. I started paying with M-Pesa two years ago when I moved to Kenya, so and that's something that you know what,
what the South has to export its solutions to the north, to the global north.
But there are many more more things like that, you know, and for example, using.
It's interesting because in many African countries you have not had at development of landline telephones, telephones,
they have jumped directly from nobody having a telephone to everybody having a mobile telephone on a mobile.
So I mean, it's difficult to give examples right now, but for example,
in terms of extensions, in terms of of market management, I also worked on the down,
got a region and you saw there very smart strategies to maximise the price of the animals and get the most of it by by just doing it.
It's interesting because you have very old ways of thinking that in in economies that are not based on cash and capital,
you know, because livestock there is capital. So they are very conservative in selling the animals,
whereas you have younger people that are very cash based and they do crazy things in the in the eyes of the old people.
You know, they sell all animals when the prices are good and they buy animals when the prices are very low.
What are you doing? And these are the guys that are doing best and that are the elder of the village with thirty five
years because they have more cattle that no one with with than anyone with this crazy strategy,
you know, so, you know, maybe with financial training and with you would achieve much better production in the livestock system.
And and just implementing these innovations, you know,
but then you would be much more willing to listen to what is happening if you say it's not what I have seen in my work experience.
Great. Well, I think we have time for one more question, and it's a hard one,
and I'm going to give it to Halina and but feel free to chip in everyone and it's a question that came through us.
How can trade regulation in the context of international be supply chains be used as a lever to promote sustainable beef consumption?
And if you want to pass on that, someone else wants to take it up. It's it's it's a hard one.
Yeah, I wanted to touch on it. I think one of the really interesting developments that's happening and people
have been following is this deforestation risk in supply chains and the U.S.
Obviously looking to bring in a regulation to prevent imported deforestation.
Then the UK sort of discussing that as well.
So that's kind of a way in which, you know, trade regulations can be used to address these kind of systemic issues.
Obviously, they have implications for the finance sector as well when these new rules come in as well.
So we're just tracking that to see what happens as well. But it's quite interesting to see this now.
You know, it's been in in the debates and that will probably force change in terms of the
companies needing to look at deforestation where they haven't looked at it before.
Particularly obviously some of these products, which Pablo mentioned before, causing a lot of deforestation, such as imported soy feed, et cetera.
Animal feed and other products, which cause a large amount of deforestation.
So that's one area, and in other areas obviously linked to the area of trade would be agricultural subsidy reform, which we've already discussed.
But how that could actually promote sustainability and long term sustainability of the sector and also other
ways in which kind of trade rules can be used to prevent of importation of high risk products as well.
Great. Well, we are we are out of time and there's many, many more questions.
I would also say that we have and the table website table debates dot org has a community platform,
so please do post your father questions and comments there.
And I will also try and twist panellists to see if they might have a go at answering some of them if they felt so inclined.
So I just want to thank thank our speakers, a great deal and for a really,
really interesting conversation, especially in light of all those technical difficulties at the beginning.
And I must also remember to remind everyone listening and thank you very much to the audience full
for listening and for submitting your questions that there is another event this time next week.
That's third, which is Tim Palmer and Charles Godfrey in conversation on the topic of modelling climate change, predicting the future.
So please, please listen in on that.
So that's I think it's now we're out of time.
Thank you very much to all our speakers, to the audience and and and a recording will be available in due course, said goodnight.