One of the most surprising things we unearthed while researching the little green guide was that eating less red meat is one of the best ways to reduce your contribution to global warming. Meat production means clearing forest, and there are a lot of fossil fuel inputs into growing feed and so on. Cows also produce a lot of methane, another climate change gas. In fact reducing your red meat intact will save more CO2 emissions than trading your car in for a hybrid. And it’s a lot cheaper too.
Meat is partly to blame for rising food prices
May 30, 2008 · Filed under commentary · Tagged biofuel, ethanol, meat, pupulation
Biofuels have been copped a lot of flack recently for driving up world food prices. About 100m tonnes of maize from this year’s US crop (or about 5% of world production) will be diverted into ethanol refineries. But as this Guardian article points out, two other factors are also forcing up demand for cereals.
For one thing, increased agricultural yields per hectare have started to dip below the rate of population growth (around 1% a year). Secondly, the growing middle class in China are eating a lot more meat. Because cows consume a lot more food than they produce as meat, this has added an extra 200m tonnes of grain per year compared to a decade ago.
As ever, the obstacles are mainly political and social. Technically, the solutions are simple – empowering women in developing nations to reduce population growth, eating less meat, developing second-generation biofuels mainly from waste sources (such as the inedible parts of food crops or food waste) and just driving less.
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