[interview: Ravi Orsini] controversies in environmental vegetarianism
"Ceasing meat-eating postpones the environmental apocalypse for dozens of years. It reduces the impact but does not solve the situation", says the environmental manager
this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com
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In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri topped the door of Hell with the phrase "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." This sentence rejuvenates every century and nowadays, 700 years after the death of the Florentine writer, it would be ideal to greet those who arrive on Earth. Let the Devil get by to find a new sign.
During COP26 – the United Nations (UN) climate conference held in Glasgow, Scotland, between November 1st and 12th, 2021 – the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, mentioned in his opening speech that the sea level has doubled in the last 30 years, the oceans are warmer than ever and that the Amazon rainforest emits more carbon than it absorbs.
Humanity has set a record in the emission of greenhouse gases – a group which includes carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) – reaching, respectively, percentages of 149%, 262%, and 123% above pre-industrial levels. Illustrating the reports on global warming accelerated by human activity there are images of cars and factories spewing smoke and cows grazing – sometimes cows grazing in front of the smoke from fires.
[I have a suggestion for those who will forge the new Earth portal: make the expression ALL HOPE in bold capital letters.]
I'm not advocating for deindustrialization: this is a point where Brazil already is, and that’s why there are so many cows and soy eating out our fields. But it is a case of thinking about strategies to reduce the emission of these gases and thus postpone the end of the world by a few years.
In the sphere of individual actions, there is the reduction of meat consumption, usage of fossil fuels, and the demand for more conscientious public policies – part of them goes through control of livestock processes (rather than forcing the citizen to become vegetarian). I talked about the first practice with Ravi Orsini, a researcher, scientist, and environmental manager who graduated from the University of São Paulo, the same institution where he completed his Master's degree, in 2019.
His dissertation is entitled Environmental vegetarianism: a study of the controversies in the relationship between vegetarianism and greenhouse gases emissions, and the research is available here [portuguese only] – on page 124, for example, there is a table with strategies to mitigate greenhouse gases emissions in livestock.
Ravi has mapped some of the controversies present in the debate over vegetarianism (on page 136 there is a box summarizing the top seven). Since every academic work is just a frame, Ravi focused on some of the climate issues. "There are numerous relationships between vegetarianism and environmental issues, and even within my scope, the seven controversies I found were the ones I had time to identify and connect in my research. These aren’t all controversies that exist," he explains.
A vegetarian for decades, Ravi had been an activist for the cause, participating in movements and groups, but it was in environmental science that he found himself. In his research, he uses the concept of environmental vegetarianism to present a path to food sustainability, which can be done by abstaining from or reducing the consumption of animal foods in the human diet for environmental reasons (page 54).
"If we stopped eating meat, we would have a lot of arable lands, because 75% of these areas are devoted to cattle raising and grain production to feed them. However, hunger isn’t about the amount of food produced. Hunger is about social inequality, and there's no way to take this issue out of the equation," he explains. We talked on the phone for two hours and I edited our conversation to fit in this newsletter.
Was there anything that surprised you during the research?
The magnitude of the environmental impacts of livestock compared to plant-based alternative products: of all the agricultural land on the planet, 25% is for the production of plant-based food, and the remainder is for animal feed or pasture production. For every BRL 1 million in revenue from extensive cattle raising in Brazil, there is BRL 22 million in environmental impact that is not compensated or even accounted for in the final price of this operation. If we take soy, another agribusiness giant, this figure for environmental impacts doesn’t reach BRL 3 million (page 52).
These environmental impacts include the emissions of greenhouse gases themselves that aggravate global warming, deforestation, fires, air pollution, water pollution… livestock is one of the industries that most pollute water in Brazil.
There is soil degradation: clearing, burning, planting grass, and putting the oxen to eat this grass in a super grazing area. This does away with the vegetative cover of the soil. Cattle tread and compact the soil, which impairs gas exchange and water infiltration and might lead to desertification in warmer areas. When land grabbing is practiced, there is an impact on biodiversity due to the animals' loss of habitat – by clearing pastures and by farmer’s hunting to eliminate predators. For example: near the Amazon biome there will be jaguars, and farmers go out to hunt them.
In Brazil, livestock is the human activity that most occupies territory. Agriculture produces much more food and calories per square meter in about half the area that livestock requires.
Some points are not so obvious. Ruminant herds in Brazil have a direct emission of methane – they consume pasture and burp methane. We have more cattle than people in Brazil, and for each molecule of methane emitted, there is an equivalent impact to 72 molecules of carbon dioxide. Another direct emission is animal waste. A cow can produce up to 50 liters of excrement a day, which generates nitrous oxide, and each molecule of nitrous oxide is equivalent to 310 molecules of carbon dioxide.
Indirect contributions are deforestation and fires to open pasture – which is called soil use change. In a decade, 80% of deforestation and burning in Brazil was used for pasture, foremost for bovine cattle raising. Deforestation and burning generate mainly carbon monoxide and dioxide gases.
Besides, there is another indirect contribution which is agricultural production to feed animals, where deforestation and burning to open the agricultural pasture that will generate the grains occurs again; plus, the fertilization of this agriculture with nitrogen compounds that will emit nitrous oxide. The entire meat transport and refrigeration system also contribute to the impact: the amount of meat produced in Brazil needs refrigerated transport and with that, there is carbon monoxide emission.
The global demand for meat is expected to double by 2050, driven by the development of the BRICS countries – especially China. Meanwhile less industrialized nations such as Brazil are decreasing their meat consumption for the same reason: the economic one. The onus of production, however, remains with the less industrialized. Do you identify any alternatives to deal with this besides the individual ones?
There is this growth of meat consumption in the BRICS and some countries in the African continent. Although this increase is frightening, the so-called developed countries have reached a ceiling on meat consumption. Several studies show that as income grows, so does meat consumption. It varies from place to place, but it is a general rule in the world.
It's worrying because of the discrepancy I mentioned: to produce food for the animal, the impact grows disproportionately in the resources consumption. That said, meat as a commodity to export is a problem, but 80% of the meat produced in Brazil is for domestic consumption. 20% seems low, but the volume is large and it makes a lot of difference.
Ceasing meat-eating postpones the environmental apocalypse for dozens of years. It reduces the impact but does not solve the situation.
I see two levels of solution: a superficial, remedial one; and a structural one. At the first level, one obvious thing would be to have both systems and public policies that help people reduce meat consumption; to have legal systems, policies, and mechanisms that acted on environmental impacts, such as greater inspection of deforestation to curb deforestation for pasture, and make illegal deforestation really onerous. Some talk about climate taxation on meat, which would be putting a tax on consumption. I didn't study this possibility in-depth, though.
Reaching the structural level, many people say that Brazil is corrupt and that this is a domestic problem, but actually, it isn't. In the dissertation, I present studies that show that the money that finances the environmental degradation, and the livestock and industrial agriculture system as a whole come from outside. This money, traced to tax havens, comes from European countries. Whoever is winning with this is not in Brazil. The structural discussion considers that it is not just about reducing meat consumption, but also involves the economic system of exploitation of basic resources in Brazil, this entire network of lobbying financing for these companies, and the cash flow that comes from developed countries. Ideally, these remedial and structural solutions would be combined.
In your dissertation’s conclusions, you indicate that the plant-based diet is the best option to (individually) begin to mitigate the impact. However, depending on the choice of ingredients and provenance, this might just be a little less bad, right?
I do not recommend it individually, but I do endorse the recommendation for this diet. As optimistic as we are, not everyone will want to go vegetarian. There are places where discussing reducing meat consumption means impacting food security. It's not in the urban centers. Not everybody will stop eating meat, not all people should, but the direction is still needed. And that direction has to be less meat. The plant-based diet concept encompasses different types of reduction in meat consumption; vegetarianism included.
Consuming less meat isn’t the ultimate solution. Indeed it is significant impact mitigation and the fastest switching point of consumption through food, but it is not a structural solution. If we continue to consume from agribusiness, it won't work: we have to consume local, family-produced food and promote fair trade. A widely used example is quinoa, which had a negative social impact on the Andean producing countries because it was massively exported, and the price for the inhabitants has risen.
When we talk about environmental vegetarianism we are not talking about ending subsistence hunting or artisanal fishing. What other practices don't fit in environmental vegetarianism? A family herd?
Whenever I talk about environmental vegetarianism, I’m describing a part of vegetarian criticism, from people who stopped eating meat because of the impacts on the natural environment. Vegans have ethics concerning animals as their primary issue, but there is also the environmental issue.
One of the conclusions of my research is that all this vegetarian environmental criticism only makes sense in these industrial systems that are impactful, and in the large-scale consumption systems that create this demand of wanting to consume meat three times a day.
This criticism of environmental vegetarianism makes no sense in all systems where animals are produced and consumed on a small scale, locally, where the microenvironment will absorb the impacts. There are places where the population's food security depends on animal production. There are places, for example, where the soil does not allow agricultural production, only pasture, or places where you only have ice, like the Inuit people. Riparian populations that practice subsistence fishing, indigenous populations fishing, and subsistence hunting.
Closer to us, for those who live in rural areas, we have our grandparents and great-grandparents. There was hardly any beef every day. When they killed the ox, they salted the meat and tried to preserve it for a long time. They had low-impact meat daily like chicken, and not always every day. If you're reading this interview, you probably don't fit this exception.
You also list obstacles to adopting a plant-based diet and "alternative carnivorisms". What do you identify as good practices within this diet that is not (or will never be) totally free of animal products?
Alternative carnivorisms is a concept by nutritionist and sociologist Elaine de Azevedo. This is another important topic: these alternative ways to consume meat (pages 35 and 129) lead to sustainable livestock farming, that is, to produce less impactful systems that, in many cases, are even beneficial.
There is no way to relativize: these systems exist and are possible. In sustainable cattle raising, the practice of intensive cattle is growing, which reduces the amount of deforestation and optimizes the use of pasture. There are criticisms, and this is the system I consider the least sustainable: there is less pasture, but the impact of deforestation goes to agriculture: huge areas are required to produce grains and cereals to feed the animals, and the impact changes from direct to indirect. As my focus is on the environment, I do not mix these ethical issues because that would be another dissertation and another research.
There is no guarantee that intensive livestock farming won't increase the size of the herd and thus increase the emission of detritus and gases in the same area. This is the most problematic way out and is where the industry has increasingly pointed out.
I place the future in another way. The most sustainable would be the extensive system based on agroforestry with pasture, which absorbs a lot of impacts locally. I wouldn’t say that it is a limitation, but important detail: these extensive systems have lower productivity than the extensive ones with deforestation. One way or another, we need to consume less meat and stop eating meat three times a day.
I believe that within these alternative carnivorisms, the meat we are going to consume in the future will have to come from these agroforestry systems, to be consumed once or twice a week.
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