Abstract
Simple SummaryThe global rise in demand for animal products for human consumption may well have an increasingly significant impact upon the natural environment, human health and the lives of farmed animals. This paper reviews some of the evidence for that impact and the future trajectories for livestock farming that it may well entail. There is a school of thought that future demand for meat and other farm animal products is unsustainable for several reasons, including greenhouse gas emissions, especially from ruminants; standards of farm animal health and welfare, especially when farm animals are kept intensively; efficiency of conversion by livestock of solar energy into (human) food, particularly by pigs and poultry; water availability and usage for all types of agricultural production, including livestock; and human health and consumption of meat, eggs and milk. Demand for meat is forecast to rise as a result of global population growth and increasing affluence. These issues buttress an impending perfect storm of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy, which is likely to coincide with global population reaching about 9 billion people in 2030 (pace Beddington). This paper examines global demand for animal products, the narrative of ‘sustainable intensification’ and the implications of each for the future of farm animal welfare. In the UK, we suggest that, though non-ruminant farming may become unsustainable, ruminant agriculture will continue to prosper because cows, sheep and goats utilize grass and other herbage that cannot be consumed directly by humans, especially on land that is unsuitable for other purposes. However, the demand for meat and other livestock-based food is often for pork, eggs and chicken from grain-fed pigs and poultry. The consequences of such a perfect storm are beginning to be incorporated in long-term business planning by retailers and others. Nevertheless, marketing sustainable animal produce will require considerable innovation and flair in public and private policies if marketing messages are to be optimized and consumer behaviour modified.
Highlights
Adviser, predicted that “... by 2030 the world will need to produce 50 per cent more food and energy, together with 30 per cent more available fresh water, whilst mitigating and adapting to climate change. This threatens to create a ‘perfect storm’ of global events.”. Anticipating such a storm and the need to weather it, we ask in this paper what are the implications for livestock farming, especially in the UK, and, crucially, for the lives of farm animals? We might ask how accurate is Beddington’s forecast of a “perfect storm”? Might it be dismissed as a ‘worst case scenario’? some will contest the accuracy and validity of predicting that far into the future, planning for a range of eventualities can be valuable
Faced with an inexorably rising global population and an increasingly aspirational global society for whom meat consumption seems to be uncritically equated with social, nutritional and cultural progression, the question of the sustainability of livestock production has been re-cast in terms of sustainable intensification, the new buzzword in global agricultural development, at least amongst the major Western actors in the global food community
As we have argued elsewhere [20], farm animals are generally seen as, on the one hand, threats to sustainability [19] or, on the other hand, as vectors for the delivery of sustainability in high landscape or high biodiversity regions where low density grazing is seen as contributory to both environmental and socio-economic sustainability of rural areas [21]
Summary
In 2009, Professor Sir John Beddington [1], when he was the UK Government’s Chief Scientific. The benefit to us is a widespread availability of chicken meat Accompanying this unequalled growth, in Britain and elsewhere, there are significant concerns about the economic rationale of global food consumption being so heavily dependent upon animal, rather than plant, products. Along with the more radical moral critiques of animal husbandry and meat consumption per se, there is fast growing ethical concern amongst consumers, amongst committed producers and amongst NGOs, in the Western countries, about the quality of life of farm animals, those animals kept in indoor intensive housing systems [13]. Whether livestock should be used in intensive production systems at all is beyond the scope of this paper It is widely accepted by many actors and commentators that highly adverse impacts on animal health and welfare might result from the intensification of husbandry in the name of ‘food security’ at whatever scale [16]. We wish to re-emphasize that concern for human food security should not be at the expense of the very real gains in farm animal welfare that have been achieved over the last 40 or so years
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