Abstract
Meat production in its current shape is burdened with multiple environmental challenges. Technological solutions have been touted as a means of reconciliation of economic growth and environmental sustainability. In Northern Ireland, anaerobic digestion (AD) technology was presented as a solution for more sustainable animal waste management and greenhouse gas emission reduction in the context of the Going for Growth (GfG) agrifood strategy. AD sites were also eligible for the Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) subsidy support scheme. While criminological engagement with the issues around food crime is yet inchoate, even less attention has been paid to the issue of the criminogenic nature of responses to food production harm. The paper fills this lacuna by discussing how an ostensibly positive initiative of incentivising AD through subsidy provision may have criminogenic potential: it may exacerbate environmental harm due to its ineffectiveness for dealing with ammonia emissions from animal waste, and create opportunities for deviance, such as breaches in planning regulation and subsidy fraud.
Highlights
Meat production in its current shape is burdened with multiple environmental challenges
This paper fills this lacuna by using a green criminological perspective, and discusses how an ostensibly positive initiative of subsidising a technological solution to deal with increasing animal waste may exacerbate environmental harm
This paper has considered the criminogenic potential of anaerobic digestion (AD) subsidies in Northern Ireland as an instrument to respond to environmental harms associated with animal waste from expanding meat production under the Going for Growth (GfG) agrifood strategy
Summary
Meat production in its current shape is burdened with multiple environmental challenges. One of the most pressing environmental challenges is animal waste (Berendes et al 2018), which is forecasted to increase by 40% during 2003–2030 globally (Cox 2019). Even less attention has been paid to the criminogenic nature of responses to harms resulting from food production. This paper fills this lacuna by using a green criminological perspective, and discusses how an ostensibly positive initiative of subsidising a technological solution to deal with increasing animal waste may exacerbate environmental harm. By connecting the discussion around subsidies to harms associated with meat production intensification, this paper advances both green criminological and state–corporate crime research
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