Dr Sean Madden, Birmingham Law School
The globalisation of industrial agricultural production, and animal-derived protein in particular, holds significant responsibility for the precipitous reduction in planetary biodiversity. As COP 17 gets underway, institutions of global governance continue to advocate for the ‘scaling up’ of terrestrial animal sourced food (TASF) production, putting them at odds with many in the scientific and medical communities. This approach is simultaneously harming biodiversity and reproducing colonial logics of subjugation, significantly diminishing outcomes for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities. So why are we committed to producing ever-increasing amounts of meat and dairy?
In this post, I argue that widespread consumption of animal protein became intertwined with conceptions of development through the colonial encounter, and that these logics are reinforced by institutions of international law and global governance today. I highlight the devastating impacts of these imperatives on biodiversity and, paradoxically, food security, and reiterate the need for reduced production order to safeguard the future for humans, and the planet more widely.
For two weeks beginning 19th October, the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity takes place in Yerevan, Armenia, against a backdrop of consistently missed targets and burgeoning environmental catastrophe.
It follows on thematically from 2022’s event, which culminated with the establishment of the non-binding Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This agreement set out 23 targets for the halting and reversal of biodiversity loss, designed to coalesce with the Sustainable Development goals and Agenda 2030, alongside 4 long-term goals crafted in pursuit of the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity.
In the four years since the GBF’s inception, environmental depredation and biodiversity destruction has continued apace. A progress report circulated in advance of this year’s conference indicated that on 22 of the 23 targets, progress is falling significantly short in terms of scope, ambition, and implementation, and crucial advancement is vanishingly unlikely to be achieved. Regrettably, this failure represents continuity with the poor record of treaties and frameworks devised with the aim of biodiversity protection. Between 1970 and 2020, the global population of vertebrates decreased by 73%, and aquatic life by 84%. Studies suggest that as many as 40% of insect species are at risk of total extinction.
Biodiversity’s continued decline has myriad implications for the struggle to arrest anthropogenic climate breakdown generally, but it is acutely detrimental to attempts to ensure food security. Variety and abundance in ecosystems play a critical role in pollination, pest control, and carbon storage, amongst other biological exchanges fundamentally undergirding our food system. Its diminution has precipitated crises of flora and fauna, drought, soil degradation, and crop failure, significantly impeding the capacity of the world’s poorest peoples to subsist. Consequently, vulnerability to food insecurity and subsequent hunger and malnutrition – in addition to the impacts of climate breakdown – are intensified.
The paradox of ‘sustainable intensification’
Industrial agricultural production represents the single largest driver of global biodiversity loss. Amongst this, the transformation of naturally rich ecosystems into monocultured farmland or grazing land, and the associated emission of greenhouse gases and agricultural run-off into air, soil, and waterways, has rendered an unparallelled impact upon species variety. Amid the sixth mass extinction that characterises the Anthropocene, livestock animals now comprise 57% of all mammalian mass on Earth, starkly contrasting the 5% of wild mammals.
Well-documented concerns regarding the proliferation of meat and dairy consumption were reinforced through a landmark report, delivered by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to coincide with COP 17, which strongly recommended a global shift towards plant-based diets specifically to arrest biodiversity destruction. Nonetheless, the tenth of the 2030 biodiversity targets advocates for what is termed “sustainable intensification” of agricultural, aquacultural, and forestry practices in order to reduce pressure on ecosystems while purportedly maintaining, and even increasing, levels of food production, with the overall goal of reducing global food insecurity, hunger, and malnourishment amongst poorer communities in the Global South. Concurrently, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has led a push towards greater consumption of Terrestrial Animal Sourced Foods (TASF), with reports extolling its health benefits and advocating for its ‘upscaling’ in order to ensure maximum caloric yield from available agricultural land released in 2023 and 2026. These recommendations are problematic for four clear reasons.
First, the concept of sustainable intensification is sufficiently nebulous and undefined as to be at risk of co-option by transnational agricultural corporations seeking to continually raise levels of production whilst appearing eco-conscious.
Second, even in the context advised by proponents, increasing the ‘yield’ of land used to rear livestock animals involves more intensive use of antibiotics More than 70% of the world’s antibiotic supply is used in livestock rearing, and this has substantial implications for antimicrobial resistance, while their presence in ecosystems is also immensely destructive to biodiversity. There is also an increased risk of the proliferation of zoonotic diseases with pandemic potential, as occurred in cases such as Covid-19, H5N1 (bird flu), or H1N1 (swine flu). Further, growing feed for intensified livestock production would necessitate greater yields from arable lands. Globally, almost 80% of soy is already fed to livestock, and it is one of a small number of crops whose production for feed has supplanted pre-existing biodiversity. This monocrop production is not only responsible for large-scale land clearance and deforestation, wiping out vast numbers of wild species, but is regularly facilitated by the use of synthetic inputs including, nitrogen-rich fertilisers, and pesticides which continue to cause significant ecological harm despite a 50% reduction in their use by 2030 forming GBF Target 7. It would also necessarily increase encroachment onto land assessed as ‘marginal’ but frequently used on a rotational basis by indigenous or other subaltern peoples exercising usufructuary rights to ensure subsistence, significantly impacting the food security of these communities.
Third, leading research in global health has consistently implicated TASF-heavy diets in increased mortality rates and chronic illness, leading groups such as the World Health Organization and The Lancet to presage the WWF and recommend a rebalancing of global diets in favour of plant-based foods for health directly, and to ensure a greater chance of staying within planetary boundaries. Such expansion, in tandem with associated increases in monocrop production and biodiversity reduction, would be severely detrimental towards ensuring the FAO’s four pillars of food security are met.
Last, but crucially, the need for increased production is greatly overstated. Annually, enough food is produced globally to feed a population of more than ten billion people, and more than 30% is wasted each year. Of this, almost 60% is wasted at household level, highlighting a systemic imbalance whereby many inhabitants of the Global North, and wealthier communities in the Global South, enjoy virtually limitless access to the cornucopia of production, while those poorer communities more vulnerable to the impacts of its excesses are less able to enjoy the fruits of the system and concomitantly are shorn of their own ability to subsist. The salient point is this: the unspoken rationale behind sustainable intensification is that so much land previously worked by subaltern peoples is now employed in the production of food for export, or consumption – and waste – by wealthier people; it is necessitated by acquiescence to the imperatives of a capitalist global food system committed to limitless growth and built upon extraction and exploitation. Although supercharged since the beginning of the neoliberal era, the existence of this system is not a novel development. Its origins lie in the earliest instances of colonialism, and the subsequent emergence of a system of international law derived from European values and which contemporarily continues to foreground the orthodoxies of the Global North.
Dietary imperialism and contemporary precarity
European colonialism in the 16th century saw imperial powers occupy territory, extract resources, and exploit indigenous populations across what was known as the New World, setting in motion a centuries long expansion that incorporated large swathes of the Americas and Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Facilitating and normalising this incursion, a new body of international law was devised – ostensibly with the goal of ‘civilisation’ and homogenisation with European values, and implicitly systematising and entrenching a power imbalance in favour of the colonising powers.
In this nascent international order, possession of sovereignty as conceived of by these powers was integral to the realisation of legal personality and enjoyment of rights. In its perceived absence, inhabitants of the New World were permitted to engage in trade and participate in treaty negotiations in a limited capacity, but it also legitimised incursion, displacement, and dispossession by those already considered, by the regime’s instigators, ‘civilised’. The ‘sovereignty doctrine’ thus elevated European values and customs while actively subordinating the epistemologies and praxis of indigenous peoples, providing a legal framework for the exploitation to come.
The violence of European colonialism was not, however, limited to the direct impacts of land and resource expropriation, or the eventual horrors of the global slave trade. It also encompassed the transplantation of European ecosystems into the space of New World biomes. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, cows, pigs, and sheep were the most prominent of innumerable plant and animal species transported to the Americas, Caribbean, and Australasia by European settlers. This attendant biological colonisation, and the creation of a ‘portmanteau biota’, allowed conquering powers to enjoy the diets and lifestyles to which they were accustomed while contributing to the subjugation of land, peoples, and resources through the displacement, disruption, and fragmentation of existing communities and their means of subsistence. The destruction of local ecosystems and indigenous food systems proved devastating for those subsisting on the land, but was justified as an attempt to ‘improve’ the state of agricultural production and the health of local peoples. Such rationalisation is redolent not only of the ‘civilising mission’ inherent to the colonial and mandate eras, but also to contemporary overtures towards the necessity of TASF-derived proteins by the FAO and indicated in the GBF.
Entrenching this dynamic, the sudden presence of non-native, domesticated, privately-owned flora and fauna facilitated the inculcation of European legal norms – including property rights and subsequent enclosure – upon peoples for whom such conceptions of ownership were antithetical to traditional and indigenous knowledge and praxis. Colonial powers viewed unenclosed land used for subsistence, communitarian, and nomadic farming as effective terra nullius, legitimising their incursion and its appropriation for the purposes of systematic and industrial agriculture – both for their own use, and for commodification. Such sequestration was indicative of the wider attitude to indigenous rights that characterised the colonial encounter and is a rationalisation mirroring that used to justify land grabs – through the myth of marginality or dismissal of indigenous title – in the Global South in the modern era.
Many implanted species thrived in their new environment, and livestock numbers and monocrop plantations proliferated, and grazing land expanded, as colonial powers utilised the resources of their new dominions to produce food for their own populations in the Global North. A system that began with British settlers as a means to ensure a regular meat supply for growing domestic urban populations was soon adopted by other conquering powers. This seismic shift saw European breeds of cattle, sheep, and pigs reared in vast quantities across the colonies, destroying communities, and disrupting ecological equilibrium, while international trade law developed contiguously to entrench existing power structures, cementing the globalisation of food and its co-option for the sustenance of wealthier states of the Global North.
In keeping with the foregrounding of European culture, values, and practices that characterised the colonial encounter and contributed to the marginalisation of indigenous peoples, the dietary habits of the Global North were explicitly presented as superior to those of the New World, and inexorably, a lifestyle considered aspirational. Heavy meat and dairy consumption became a shibboleth for wealth, culture, power, and economic development. Both became entwined with notions of masculinity and strength. The resultant ubiquity and regularity of meat and dairy in the global human diet is an historical anomaly. Indigenous communities of the Americas, Africa, parts of Asia, and the Pacific region display high levels of lactose malabsorption – or intolerance – compared with those of Northern European descent, and while traditional hunter-gatherer societies incorporated animal proteins into their diets, the scale at which production and consumption takes place today is unsustainably higher. FAO data demonstrates the average person eats between four and six times as much meat as in the 1960s. The entrenchment of high levels of meat and dairy consumption emerged not as a result of necessity but of desirability, and of a conquering force whose usurpation included the primacy of all elements of their culture, including food. It is a historical ‘upscaling’ that proved devastating for global biodiversity.
Colonial encroachment upon land and resource alongside ultra-commodification of nature and non-human animals began the process of environmental depredation and biodiversity destruction, but the resultant impoverishment of the post-colonial state effectively encouraged continuity of this dynamic, and exploitation of resource by post-colonial governments charged with the furtherance of economic development. The complexity of the situation was intensified as dichotomies between Global North and South became blurred, with high levels of meat and dairy consumption increasingly commonplace amongst wealthier sections of society within the post-colonial state and reflecting internal stratification. Today, around one third of the world’s meat and dairy is produced in the Americas. As a result of large-scale livestock and feed production which has proliferated significantly since the beginning of the neoliberal era, Latin America and the Caribbean have suffered a reduction in wildlife populations of 95% on 1970 levels. Asia and Africa, the other two largest producers, have experienced similarly precipitous reductions. The disproportionate loss experienced particularly in South America is largely due to the abundance of species native to the Amazon, Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, and other tropical rainforests of the region. Nonetheless, only 21% of Brazilian Amazonian beef is consumed abroad, with most of this exported to the US, China, and Europe. Three times this amount is consumed within Brazil by wealthier consumers in the ‘developed’ southwest, including metropolitan centres such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. It is a development reflected elsewhere around the globe, as elites in the world’s poorest countries consume TASF a rate equivalent to those in OECD member states.
In stark contrast, the loss of biodiversity engendered by intense production has substantially reduced the volume and variety of food available to those already living with both climate and (often associated) dietary precarity. Subsistence agriculture carried out by indigenous and other forest peoples is intensely vulnerable to ecosystem changes, and these communities are amongst those suffering to the greatest degree from food insecurity whilst benefitting the least from industrial production. Given the prerequisites for intensification and the impacts of livestock proliferation over the past four centuries, increased production of the kind envisaged by the GBF and FAO will only exacerbate preexisting inequalities in land rights and access to food. That it is necessitated almost directly as a result of consumption and waste amongst wealthier communities of the Global North and South appears particularly egregious and short-sighted.
Conclusions
Intensified TASF production appears at odds with scientific consensus on limits to growth, planetary boundaries, and biodiversity protection. In pursuing this course, institutions of global governance are also complicit in the advancement of a conception of dietary habits whose purported universal suitability is rooted in the earliest colonial encounters, in ecological and economic imperialism, and in greenwashing. That this drive is actively devastating for global biodiversity is axiomatic, but the attendant consequences for food security and malnutrition – the alleviation of which is crucial to the mission of the UN bodies in question – seriously undermine the position of international law, leaving the impression of acquiescence to the demands of global markets, and advance the imperative of economic growth more than half a century after recognition of its ecological and societal limits.
What is necessary for a serious reckoning with biodiversity loss is a reassessment of global attitudes to food production and consumption, including reductionism in the Global North and amongst other wealthier communities, freeing up land and resource for truly sustainable subsistence agriculture and self-reliance for poorer, rural communities, comprised of a wide variety of foods lending resistance to the inevitable shocks of climate breakdown and improving food security and levels of nutrition.
Neoliberal globalisation sustains the expansion and propagation of industrial agriculture alongside a consumerism grounded in the propagation of Western habits including overconsumption of meat and dairy, in contrast to the aberrance of non-European dietary habits. The system of international law which legitimises European habits is rooted in the expropriation and exploitation of settler colonialism; still expanding for production and, in the case of biodiversity conservation, still consuming land despite the traditional claims and contemporary use of indigenous peoples. The prevailing food system not only globalises idealised European dietary habits but advances a warped, bloated, and deeply unsustainable rendering of this praxis, entrenching the primacy of economic growth through presentation of TASF-heavy diets as aspirational. To commit to the intensification of production is to accede to the demands of capital. It is resignation to the continuing destruction of global biodiversity. Institutions of international law and global governance must be bolder in challenging orthodoxy if they are to seriously address the root causes of the rapidly approaching cataclysm.