There’s a pretty intense study in Nature Communications out on this. Summary: here.
They looked at what would happen if England and Wales fully converted to organic farming: crops and animals.
It turns out that if you want to obtain the same amount of total metabolisable energy overall, you would end up having to import more food from overseas, and clearing the land from grasslands/forest to produce this food would mean that—overall—greenhouse gas emissions would rise. Given current consumption, they predicted a 40% shortfall in metabolisable energy from domestic sources.
There are of course heaps of hypotheses they have to make in order to model this kind of thing. And they talk about the advantages alongside the disadvantages of organic farming. It’s a tricky one, and not an anti-organic diatribe at all.
As I was reading it though, a couple of things came to mind.
First, let’s face it, on average people eat too much in rich countries. In the UK, a full 28% were clinically obese in 2018, and a further 34% overweight. It is unlikely anyone would actually starve to death in England or Wales if total energy production decreased, even if there were a shortfall of 40%, unless society as a whole let it happen.
Second, there’s an elephant in the room, trying to hide in the corner: How does the math turn out if meat consumption decreased by say 50%?
That would free up land, both directly in terms of less space needed for animals, and indirectly in terms of less plants needed to be grown to feed animals (especially chickens and pigs).
This scenario not taken into account at all in the article’s calculations, but to be fair, they do mention it near the end:
“Given the much larger contribution of livestock farming to GHG emissions, a greater impact could be gained from reduced meat consumption. Less livestock farming could release land for crops for human consumption and for other purposes such as carbon storage”.
Before we have time to digest this possibility, they put it in a global context:
“However, against this, global trends are towards greater per capita and total meat consumption”.
It will be interesting to see what happens at the intersection of climate catastrophe, population increase, meat consumption, and lab-grown meat consumption over the next few years.
Stay tuned.
[Photo credit: Ivan Bandura on Unsplash]