No devoted meat eater wants to hear that their preferred steak – or burger, or stew, or sausage – plays a role in worsening the climate crisis. But the terrible, cruel truth is that meat production, especially beef, makes up a sizeable chunk of the dangerous greenhouse gases heating the planet.
Food systems emissions (from all food and agricultural sources combined) contribute one-third of all global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), and emissions from the production of animal-source foods are the largest contributor to that, responsible for 57% of that third. This means that producing animal-based foods for human consumption – beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fish and dairy products – is causing more than 15% of Earth’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
“The trend globally is for emissions from food systems to be rising,” says Andrew Bennie, a researcher at the Institute for Economic Justice in South Africa, “so even if targets for reductions are met but food systems continue on their current trends we won’t meet the 1.5°C target.” Bennie is referring to the global target of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, a legally binding international treaty that requires every country to define how they will limit their greenhouse gas emissions so that all countries together limit global heating to less than 1.5°C below pre-industrial levels, by 2030.
In 2019, global recognition that food growing and production is a major driver of the climate crisis set off an international effort to give countries around the world guidance on how what we choose to eat could make or break our efforts to turn the tide on climate change. But that guidance, in the form of the “planetary health diet” by the EAT-Lancet Commission – a “flexitarian” diet consisting mostly of plants, including legumes and nuts, and optionally small amounts of fish, chicken and meat – has not yet ignited countries’ enthusiasm to change food-related policies, to incentivise consumers’ more climate-friendly food choices.
One country has made a start, though: Denmark, in June 2024, announced that it will introduce a tax on livestock carbon emissions, making it the first country to tax emissions on agriculture. Farmers will be taxed the equivalent of about $100 a year per cow. Farmers will pass the tax on to the consumer (this is intentional), raising the price of meat. New Zealand was considering doing the same until criticism from farmers halted that effort.
In South Africa, while more than three-quarters of our total emissions (78%) come from the energy sector – no surprise, given its dirty-coal backbone – an emissions-reduction focus needs to be mainly on energy, agriculture is in second place, contributing 11% to our overall emissions.
The main contributor to agricultural emissions is the methane from cows and their manure, making meat production responsible for almost 7.5% of South Africa’s total GHG emissions (that is, 68% of the 11%), in 2022, according to the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE).
Methane, also released into the atmosphere by food waste in landfills, and by oil, gas and coal mining and processing, traps heat up to 80 times more effectively than carbon dioxide over 20 years, making it a much more potent contributor to global heating. (An optimistic aspect of this is that countries’ reducing their methane emissions soon could have a very rapid positive impact on global GHGs, because methane only lasts in the atmosphere for 10 to 20 years.)
So, what is South Africa doing about meat-related greenhouse-gas emissions?
South Africa does not yet have agriculture – or meat production-specific – targets for GHG emissions reduction: The last Nationally Determined Contribution South Africa submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (how much it intends to reduce its emissions towards the global target) does not contain separate climate-mitigation targets for agriculture.
However, the government has realised the necessity to define targets specific to agriculture, and the DFFE is in the process of approving new Sectoral Emissions Targets, with a draft bill published for public comment on 26 April 2024.
In the meantime, in 2022, the red meat industry in South Africa published a growth strategy, focusing mainly on beef, which makes up 80% of the country’s red meat production value.
For researchers at South Africa’s Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), the strategy raised some thorny questions about how to square the conflicting aims of climate justice in South Africa with the meat industry and the government’s prioritising growing the red meat livestock sector by 35% by 2030, mainly by increasing beef exports from 5% to 20% of total production.
The strategy, Bennie says, prioritises growth but positions itself around the concept of “inclusion” by broadening the commercial livestock playing field – aiming for greater integration of smaller commercial cattle farmers in South Africa, of whom there are an estimated one million. (An estimated three million households overall own cattle, including for cultural reasons.) Even though the industry has been consolidating into fewer major producers, these smallholder farmers represent 40% to 50% of the “national herd” of 12.3 million head of cattle.
The IEJ guidance document is in part a response to this strategy, aiming “to give straightforward, to-the-point information around the expansion of industrial beef farming and the export of beef”, Bennie said in an online meeting with journalists, “and what this strategy means for the environment, for smallholder farmers, and for workers”.
(An estimated 100,000 people work in meat production in South Africa, and an undefined additional number in “downstream” meat-related jobs such as abattoirs and meat processing.)
Many farmers interviewed by the IEJ acknowledged that climate change is an issue, Bennie says, but some were “more concerned with the impacts of climate change rather than their contribution to CC”. A key question, therefore, is how can a red meat industry growth strategy balance sustainability with equity – and is the growth of the existing industrial, feedlot-based system the means to a just transition that would see greater inclusion of smallholder farmers in commercial livestock farming? The IEJ guidance memo, Bennie says, “is questioning whether simply growing the industry through exports is the answer, rather than considering a wider range of alternative development strategies as well”.
What should the government and industry do, now, to fix this?
“There needs to be a more holistic, multicriteria approach that is not only about growth,” Bennie told Daily Maverick, “but seeks to bring together [other factors including] protecting and supporting livelihoods. There is the potential for even further consolidation in the meat industry as a result of climate change, he says, as well as the potential for intensification of inequality as a result of climate change impacts, between communal-grazing [smallholder] and commercial farmers, which could even further undermine the inclusionary aims of the red meat growth strategy.
There are a few ways to adopt a more holistic approach to balancing sustainability and equity, Bennie says. One way is to not focus solely on emissions, which tends to catalyse technological innovations to reduce cattle’s methane emissions (the approach taken in the DFFE’s draft paper on sectoral emissions targets) but does not address food security, consumption inequalities or the broader inclusion of smallholder farmers.
Another is to get on board with international scientific consensus on the role of healthy and sustainable diets, because reducing meat consumption and reducing food waste would make a huge impact on their combined 25% of total global emissions. (Livestock farming alone accounts for 14% to 17% of all global emissions, and food waste for another 8% to 10%.)
But according to the IEJ paper, more work needs to be done before South Africa is ready to take that holistic approach. “There simply is not clear-enough data to form a full evidence base to guide key actions and policies,” Bennie told Daily Maverick, so the IEJ guidance memo’s first recommendation is to commission a socioecological assessment of the industry, conducted by independent experts in a democratic and transparent manner.
“We know this may not sound concrete, actionable and clear enough in terms of [an] intervention that actually does something immediately,” Bennie concedes, but it is critical, he says, to establish a baseline as a foundation for comprehensive, cross-sectoral planning.
“This [assessment] is needed to make a clearer statement about the life-cycle emissions associated with beef, and their likely future trajectories, to better inform what exactly an ‘acceptable’ level of emissions would be, what production and consumption levels would align with this, and what interventions would be needed to remain within those emissions levels.” Those interventions “would need to look beyond simply technological interventions and include alternative development strategies that support the livelihoods of the majority of smallholder cattle owners and regenerate ecosystems”. Daily Maverick
The Beef with Climate Change: Growth, Equity and a Just Transition in the Beef Sector in South Africa was researched and written by Dr Andrew Bennie and Dr Andrew Bowman, supported by the Tiny Beam Fund.
Adèle Sulcas is a writer and senior adviser for Daily Maverick’s Food Justice project, and a contributor to the WHO Bulletin.
