Polluting the environment
Polluting the environment
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, reports that the UN’s livestock production accounts for 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (cars and transport account for 14%). The livestock sector is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”. Livestock production, mostly factory farming, is expected to double across the globe by 2050.
Noxious lagoons
Around 9% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are from livestock. Animals’ digestive systems and their manure create 37% of the world’s atmospheric methane emissions from human activity. Animal manure and the mineral fertiliser used to grow livestock feed are responsible for 65% of all atmospheric nitrous oxide emissions from human activity. A factory farm with 5,000 pigs produces about 25 tons of raw faecal waste every day. In the US and much of Europe this is disposed of in huge open lagoons or sprayed directly onto fields.
In the UK effluent is generally enclosed in tanks with controls on how it is used on the land. Denmark and the Netherlands also have tighter regulations than the rest of Europe.
In most factory systems the pigs are closely confined in buildings with slatted floors, which allow their faeces to drop through to collect on concrete slabs below. From there, the manure, containing high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, is pumped into nearby open-air lagoons or tanks. In Europe and the US, excess faeces may be sprayed onto nearby fields as well. This has polluted the environment and harmed both human and ecological health.
Lagoons can leak or overflow, releasing tens of thousands of gallons nitrates and phosphorus into rivers, streams and coastal waters each year, killing fish and causing pfisteria outbreaks. The untreated animal excrement is often over-applied to the farmland allowing it to run off the fields and pollute watercourses. The faecal lagoons give off large amounts of ammonia and methane, gases dangerous to both workers and local residents.
The disappearing forest
One-third of the world’s total cultivable land is dedicated to growing cereal and soya to feed livestock, while a further 7% is used for grazing animals. Eighty per cent of the world’s soya beans and 60% of its maize and barley are grown for livestock feed.
Much of this land is acquired by destroying forests, a major cause of CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity. Between 2004 and 2005 around 1.2 million hectares of rainforest were cut down as a result of soya expansion, almost entirely for animal feed and livestock pastures.
How livestock production contributes to 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions
Source: McMichael et al. (2007) Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health. The Lancet, 370(9594), 1253-1263
In Latin America the land devoted to soya crops doubled between 1994 and 2004, and deforestation, particularly of the Amazon rainforest, now accounts for around 75% of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions. Soya cultivation in Brazil to date occupies an area of land the size of Great Britain.
Much of it is grown for export: Europe imports 18 million tonnes of soya beans and meal from Brazil annually. Three US-based agricultural commodities giants – Cargill, ADM and Bunge – are responsible for about 60% of the total financing of soya production in Brazil. Together, these three companies control more than 75% of the soya-crushing capacity in Europe that supplies soya meal and oil to the animal feed market fuelling Europe’s intensive meat and dairy production.
In 2006 Greenpeace and major UK food companies, including McDonald’s, joined forces to broker a two-year moratorium on multinational traders buying soya from newly deforested land in the Amazon rainforest. As a result of pressure from this alliance, Cargill, ADM, Bunge, French-owned Dreyfus and Brazilian-owned Amaggi were brought to the negotiating table. Greenpeace now warns that for a major breakthrough to take place, there needs to be real action on the ground.
Further reading
CIWF – Global Warning: Climate Change and Farm Animal Welfare Summary Report (2008)
Greenpeace – Eating up the Amazon (2006)
Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options – FAO report, 29 Nov 2006