The report, supported by the UN environment programme (Unep), focused on three solutions. First is a shift to plant-based diets because cattle, sheep and other livestock have the biggest impact on the environment.
More than 80% of global farmland is used to raise animals, which provide only 18% of calories eaten. Reversing the rising trend of meat consumption removes the pressure to clear new land and further damage wildlife. It also frees up existing land for the second solution, restoring native ecosystems to increase biodiversity.
The availability of land also underpins the third solution, the report said, which is farming in a less intensive and damaging way but accepting lower yields. Organic yields are on average about 75% of those of conventional intensive farming, it said.
We should use less land to save wildlife. Hmm, OK.
We should use organic farming, which uses more land, in order to save wildlife.
They’re insane.
They can fuck right off in both directions at once.
The TV Quorn adverts boil my piss never the fucking veggie and insect eating sacks of cockroach shite.
Thank you Mr Ecks. My sentiments exactly.
After having found out where Quorn comes from, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever touch the stuff.
Funny how all this veggie/vegan is all over the place now.
They’ve been around for ages of course but its always been a niche thing in western nations.
Is it because we are overrun with Hindus now or is it because we are being astroturfed?
A lot of “global farmland” is only farmland because it is suitable for grazing. Take away the animals and it ceases to be farmland.
It is part of the attempted green brainwashing shite BlokeinBrum.
They think that after 50 years of getting eco-shite into kids brains the time is ripe for their Marxian takeover and self-selected mass misery for us plebs. Fortunately the human race is much more selfish than that. All they have succeeded in creating is a bumper crop of phony hypocrites who want misery for other people.
We still need to fight back in every possible way of course.
They’re insane.
I mean, yarp, but insanity barely covers it. Some people are amusingly insane and believe in harmless things such as fairies or homeopathy or David Icke or whatnot.
This is misanthropic insanity. They want you to live a miserable, restricted half-life somewhere between the Helots of old and Norfolk today because they hate you, and mean to do you harm.
David Thompson of David Thompson’s blog spent years asking if the obnoxious personality precedes the obnoxious politics. With hindsight he was being far too kind – I think we’ve gathered enough data now to confidently diagnose every aspect of modern leftism as antisocial mental illness writ political.
That’s why they want you to live in a freezing cold eco-mudhut, eat bugs, drink fermented cat piss and worship brown people. We’ve had parasitic, vindictive “elites” for most of human history (Wat Tyler really did nothing wrong), but the new elites and the institutional class that services and emulates them are different.
No skin in the game anymore (often literally, due to the fertility crisis), and they believe technology and globalisation will allow them to live the Eloi life forever. Present day plutocrats, PMs and Presidents are a lot more socially insulated from their own subjects than Marie Antoinette ever was.
What about us Morlocks then? Let us eat Eloi.
“Funny how all this veggie/vegan is all over the place now.
They’ve been around for ages of course but its always been a niche thing in western nations.”
It’s certain countries & certain sorts of people within countries. US (coastal?), UK, some of the northern Euros. Basically the wealthier economies. I don’t often come across Spanish veggies, let alone vegans. I believe the Greek words for vegetarian would translate as “english bint”. Pretty well the whole of S. America is enthusiastically big-time carnivorous (if they can afford it) Do Russians do veggie? Never met one. Knew a Polish film designer in London who was, but film designer in London. Can’t imagine Hungarians packing down Quorn goulash.
I saw a TV ad for “veg based chicken strips” and it made me laugh. They should actually label what ever it actually is-mushroom/algae/microplasm but if they want to play the imitation game then might be a good idea to have some mandatory labels such as Synthochuck. Probably the reason it didn’t bother me was I’m not a big fan of turkey twizzlers either which i imagine are the nearest substitute product in that market.
‘More than 80% of global farmland is used to raise animals, which provide only 18% of calories eaten.’
Disingenuous… about 6 billion have little meat in their diet and live mostly off cereals, maize, rice, and limited vegetables – which is why many are poorly nourished. Large swathe of India has a vegetarian population for religious reasons. And that ‘more than 80%’ cannot be accurate unless they are including places like, for example, the whole North York moors, Derbyshire Peak District, where sheep roam.
Cattle & sheep use land that is mostly unsuitable for crops. Meat contains all the essential amino-acids Humans need for tissue building/repair.
Animals spend most of their day grazing and concentrating nutriment from vegetation, so Humans do not have to. And animals have gastrointestinal systems adapted for better digestion of plant material.
More land would be required anyhow to grow enough vegetation to replace meat.
This bit is curious “farming in a less intensive and damaging way”. Less intensive would appear to mean less effective, which is normally considered a bad idea. Don’t plant a large field where you can get economies of scale, let’s do it like they did in the 1400s. Doing it less efficiently would almost certainly mean increasing damage when all is said and done.
Seems to be more of a worship of Little House on the Prairie than anything else.
BiS,
You remind me that on a trip to Spain many years ago, our Spanish host advised my then vegetarian girlfriend that there *was* a Spanish word for vegetarian, but that there was no point learning it as nobody would understand what it meant.
BTW, vegetarian is a thing here, there is a festival in November for it. “Aharn jay” in Thai. Buddhists you see.
Great comments all. There is only one aspect of their report that I agree is worth looking at, and that is agricultural subsidies, although probably not for the reasons that they want. There is no point for the EU CAP to pay a French farmer to use almost free nuclear electric to suck a stream dry to irrigate maize which is then turned into silage to feed cows, whilst blocking with tariffs Argentine beef which lives on grass all year round. Why do our tomatoes in winter come from Dutch heated and lit greenhouses whilst blocking Africa from their turn to export their way towards becoming developed economies?
“They’re Insane”
I suspect that many are simply stupid, and others crooked.
Plant based diet…and I was so looking forward to my sirloin steak & Oklahoma onion burger themed weekend menu. Well, I do intend to make some steakhouse-style creamed spinach for a side dish as I am a great fan of a balanced diet.
Did anyone else notice that during the empty-shelves phase of Lockdown1, the veggie shelf was still stocked?
Even the locusts won’t touch the stuff.
To follow up on TMB and John B, farmers as profit seeking individuals aren’t really interested in raising livestock unless it is the most efficient means of turning their land into nourishing food. Generally, horticulture and arable farming is a lot less time intensive, involves fewer hours of balls-aching work and is more profitable.
You graze animals because that’s all your land is economically useful for.
‘ontheotherhand’ – Argentinian beef is no longer produced by grass-fed grazers. The Pampas is now set to growing soya and the cattle are all in feed lots, a la the US.
“Why do our tomatoes in winter come from Dutch heated and lit greenhouses whilst blocking Africa from their turn to export their way towards becoming developed economies?”
Maybe because the modern dutch greenhouses are a very economic and efficient way to get 5 times the yield/m² compared to what Poor Africans can manage, if they don’t shoot up the place in one of their tribal wars to begin with?
African tomatoes which, incidentally, would need to be harvested green, and artificially ripened in transport to get them to european markets in a state where they will actually sell?
Or the african tomatoes that get exported to Europe while other Poor Africans have created the next wave of famine, so the Usual Suspects can froth about the Evil White Imperialists stealing food from the Poor?
Take your pick…
Is it because we are overrun with Hindus now or is it because we are being astroturfed?
Indian veggie food is actually very tasty (once in a while) so I can’t imagine they want to eat the burger and sausage-shaped soya muck going unsold in my local supermarket. As BiS notes, outside of a few religions, vegetarianism and veganism is just another Anglosphere neurosis.
I find its wholesale promotion rather sinister. Literally all the broadsheets started promoting it at the same time. Which means they’ve been fed it by a PR campaign, they certainly wouldn’t come up with this, or any other, idea. I wonder who is behind it…
On the subject of misanthropic insanity, I’ve been particularly annoyed by the trailers for the latest opus from David Attenborough on the Beeb saying Earth was a perfect planet until humanity ruined it. I have no desire to watch propaganda for the Optimum Population Trust, however sumptuous the wildlife videography used to sugar the pill, and even less desire to pay for it.
TomJ
x100
The sooner Attenborough ‘retires’ the better. Quite how this misanthropic snob got to be the great Yogi for our age defeats me. He has always seen the great unwashed as a cancer on the earth, which should be left to the pleasant enjoyment of him and those few like him.
The trouble with these types is there metaphysical block. They cannot see humans as being as much a part of ‘Nature’ as an ant, antelope, arachnid, anemone or an ash. Humans are just ‘naturally’ doing what humans as a species in nature do.
“They can fuck right off in both directions at once.”
Mr Ecks wins the Internet!
More than 80% of global farmland is used to raise animals
Why so? Because this farmland is suitable for extensive husbandry and unsuitable for agriculture. Uplands, Highlands, Alps, pampas, prairies, semi-deserts and deserts together make up a lot of “farmland”. Converting herdsman into horticulturalsts would lead to a lot of them dying because the yield from such land would be nugatory.
I rather assumed that was the desired outcome, along with the death from starvation of 80% of the rest of the human population.
TomJ- indeed, I ended up half-watching it and had to strongly resist the urge to throw something at the TV…
‘I rather assumed that was the desired outcome, along with the death from starvation of 80% of the rest of the human population.’
So did I, BiW.
Andy ex-Taiwan, I had the misfortune to catch the beginning of an episode of Attenborough’s latest bilge. It took all of 3 minutes before he mentioned climate change.
Attenborough propaganda is the best propaganda though:
Camera: *shows polar bear with cubs exploring sea ice*
Attenborough: “the mother searches for seal meat with which to feed her cubs”
Camera: *shows cubs joyfully play fighting*
Attenborough: “so anyway 3 billion people need to die to ensure these cubs can be fed in future”
I think most of us dying is a feature not a bug.
Pol Pot was simply a man ahead of his time.
Once reviled, this socialist visionary would today be the leading candidate for head of the UN.
As others have noted their arguments about farmland are self reinforcing:
There’s sheep on those hills, sheep are farm animals therefore those hills are farmland.
Is there nobody in the 4th estate capable of a bit of thinking? I hope Andrew Neil’s new venture lives up to,its billing and rips them all a new arsehole.
Funny how if you graze sheep on uplands, it gets called farmland. Gizza hand out.
But take away the grazing animal and it isn’t.
How on earth is grass not a farm crop if left alone and either harvested later or returned to the soil, but is a crop if it is eaten in real time.
I’m amazed no one has pointed out that organic farming fundamentally incorporates livestock farming. Without the manure from livestock, you rapidly exhaust all the nutrients in the soil and yields drop through the floor. All farming was mixed (ie incorporates a cycle of livestock and plant production on the same land) for millennia because thats the only way it can work long term, in the absence of the artificial fertilisers that we rely on today.
Jim,
Aren’t livestock also used in the move to no till farming that greens advocate?
“Aren’t livestock also used in the move to no till farming that greens advocate?”
Livestock isn’t a requirement of no-till farming, no. It probably is the case that arable farmers in general will increasingly want to incorporate livestock into their rotations for soil and nutrient improvement reasons, but there’s no absolute necessity for livestock if you move from a cultivation based arable system to a no-till one. But if you restrict or remove the ability to use artificial fertilisers then livestock are crucial to maintaining any sort of decent yield.