John Quiggin suggests that we could feed everyone a high-meat diet and reduce climate change to boot by shifting from livestock to chickens:
I’ve previously argued that we can feed the world if we make the right choices. More precisely, our current food system produces more per person than is needed for adequate nutrition, and can continue do so in future if the right policy choices are made. The key problem is distribution, not production.
But the meat consumption data leads me to a more surprising conclusion. Using current technology and with no additional diversion of food grain, the world could produce enough meet to give everyone an intake comparable to that of the average person in the Netherlands [fn1].
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Each kg of grain-fed beef requires about 8kg of grain, compared to 2kg for chicken, and the trade-off similar when cattle are pastured on land that could be used for grain. So, 5kg of beef could be replaced by 20 kg of chicken.
The other main user of grain (apart from human consumption) is ethanol production which now takes something like 140 million tonnes a year. Fed to chickens that would produce around 70 million tonnes or 10kg per person per year.
That would give an average of 62kg [meat consumption] per person per year, not far below the Dutch average. To fill the remaining gap, I’ll call on the usual suspects, reductions in inefficiency and waste.
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But a large part of my reason for doing exercises like this one is to consider the feasibility of a better world, even if it might be considered utopian at present.
This may all be correct, but far from being an unachievable utopian vision it sends a shiver down my spine. Brian Tomasik has crunched some numbers and estimated that the direct animal suffering caused by each kg of chicken meat produced is probably an order of magnitude greater than the suffering per kg of beef produced. This is because chickens are much smaller than cows and because their lives on factory farms are worse, being confined to tiny cages as they are.
If we were looking to paint utopian food scenarios, I could do better than envisage an explosion in the number of broiler chickens. We could see a shift towards vegetarianism, which the article implicitly observes requires fewer resources than meat-based diets. We could learn to grow meat or other meat substitutes the same way we grow plants, removing the need for all the suffering and inefficiency of incarcerating actual animals. Or at least we could develop the conscience not to torture chickens in this way in order to save small amounts of money.
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May 15, 2012 at 12:07 am
Peter Wood
Perhaps animal suffering, being an externality, should be taxed?
May 15, 2012 at 12:42 am
Sage
Awesome idea, but maybe politically implausible. It’s also not clear how to measure the suffering.
May 15, 2012 at 8:44 am
Robert Wiblin
I’ve been meaning to blog on a Pigouvian suffering tax for a while. I doubt it would work but it is a thought provoking idea.
May 15, 2012 at 3:47 am
Brian Tomasik
The meat industry likes to use the word “protein” instead of “meat” to describe their product, as if you can only get protein from meat. Here’s one quote from Harish’s blog (http://countinganimals.com/meat-industry-advertising/): “A piece in FeedStuffs, a popular agribusiness newsletter, once suggested that ‘maybe HSUS could lower its voice’ to avoid ‘the blame for promoting a future protein shortage!’”
That said, I suppose the article you cited would say that it’s more practical to get people to switch from beef to chicken than from beef to tofu.
I get similar shivers when I hear people suggesting eating insects as a way to combat global warming. Granted, I don’t know if insect farms would be as bad as chicken farms, but I can’t imagine they would be raised or slaughtered with much concern for their welfare, and the numbers would be enormous.
Quick note on chickens: Birds raised for meat are usually not in battery cages (unlike chickens raised for eggs); rather, they’re in big, crowded sheds without cages. I think these conditions are still worse than those of beef cows, because cows arguably have the best lives of any factory-farmed animal, since they spend a fair portion of their lives outside. I still think cow lives are not worth living in view of things like castration and dehorning without anaesthesia, long transport without food or water, and especially dismemberment during slaughter occasionally while still conscious, but it’s better per day than for broiler chickens.
May 15, 2012 at 6:25 am
John Quiggin
As I noted elsewhere, the cruel treatment of animals is done to save on labor and other inputs. We could have the same grain input and protein output without any ill treatment.
Responding to Brian, beef cattle have much better lives than the billion or so poor people who are the subject of the original post, for whom hunger and long journeys for water are part of daily life, not occasional bad experiences, and who are entirely aware that they face shortened lives and often painful deaths So, it’s important to think about priorities here.
May 15, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Sage
It’s a good point, but poor people aren’t deliberately created to produce meat. It’s not like producing food in less painful ways will necessarily make suffering from poverty worse, or vice versa. Solutions to these problems don’t necessarily have to compete with each other, they could complement each other or work independently from each other.
Furthermore, in my experience, people place an irrationally high discount rate on animal suffering, as compared to human suffering. I think most people care more about human suffering, which means that those of us who care equally about both should focus on the animal side to compensate for that very common bias.
May 15, 2012 at 9:17 pm
Robert Wiblin
We could, though the countries that would be likely to expand their chicken consumption show relatively little concern for animal welfare and so we can’t really count on that happening.
If your main desire is to give people a nutritious diet without requiring too much land then a mostly plant diet is going to win hands down. Plants can deliver enough protein – the reason to add meat is that it tastes good.
Sorry I missed your comments on animal welfare elsewhere.
I feel for the humans who suffer in poverty too, but treating animals badly doesn’t do much to reduce their poverty.
May 16, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Brian Tomasik
All things considered, I would rather be a hungry human than a beef cow, because as a human I would be less likely to be torn apart while conscious. But as the others have noted, this question isn’t here nor there: Increasing beef-cow suffering by one unit doesn’t decrease poor-human suffering by more than one unit, at least as far as I can tell.