FAO向肉食工業妥協(英文) - 羅伯特•古德蘭

FAO的這項政策傾向於“改進”畜牧業對資源的消耗，而不是減少肉類的生產和消費。

FAO的宗旨是提供一個“中立的平臺”，這使之無法在科學上保持獨立性。即使是在《牲畜的巨大陰影》這篇報告裏，也是綜合了各方的觀點(有些論點甚至相互矛盾)。

文章指出，《牲畜的巨大陰影》的主要作者 Henning Steinfeld 甚至在2010年10月就撰文質疑減少肉類消費的政策。

FAO機構本身的這種特點，使之只能是一個協調各方觀點的機構，無法與任何一方對立，特別是具有強大背景的畜牧業。

文中指出，FAO的某些合夥人甚至支持發展大規模工業化養殖，這一受到多方詬病的產業。

由於畜牧業對環境危害的相關研究和資料越來越多，特別是有關畜牧業碳排放的資料，使畜牧業的發展受到公眾廣泛的質疑。對此，2012年3月國際家畜研究所(ILRI)公佈的一項政策說：“要加強研究以回應這些挑戰”。

文章再次討論了畜牧業的碳排放量問題，關於FAO計算的資料18%和作者本人計算的51%的差距。作者指出，《牲畜的巨大陰影》估計的牲畜和飼料的土地使用為占地球陸地的30%，而國際家畜研究所(ILRI)估計資料為45%。FAO在這篇報告中顯然低估了這一資料。

因為文中給出了大量的原始資料鏈結(在這裏，我們已經把部分鏈結指向了有中譯文的地址)，所以我們將英文原文全部複製過來，有興趣的讀者可以進一步深入研究。

2012年7月11日

The past year has been the warmest ever in the United States, with record heat sweeping across the country last week, causing at least 52 human deaths and also harming livestock. In fact, livestock are not only harmed by human-caused global-warming greenhouse gas, but also cause about 18 percent of it, according to "Livestock's Long Shadow" a 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report by FAO livestock specialists (who normally promote livestock).

In contrast, environmental specialists employed by two other United Nations specialized agencies, the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, have developed a widely-cited assessment that at least 51 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas is attributable to livestock. I'm one of those specialists.

One might expect the FAO to work objectively to determine whether the true figure is closer to 18 percent or 51 percent. Instead, Frank Mitloehner, known for his claim that 18 percent is much too high a figure to use in the U.S., was announced last week as the chair of a new partnership between the meat industry and FAO.

FAO's new partners include the International Meat Secretariat and International Dairy Federation. Their stated objective is to "assess the environmental performance of the livestock sector" and "to improve that performance," starting with a three-year project to establish "methods and guidelines."

Yet within five years, greenhouse gas may increase to irreversibly catastrophic levels if nothing is done to change course, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency.

The new partnership assumes that meat production worldwide will "more than double" from 1999 to 2050. But the International Food Policy Research Institute has set out a scenario by which meat production will decline at least through 2030. Climate authorities like Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the seminal Stern Review on the economics of climate change, and Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair, have even recommended vegetarian diets to reverse climate change.

FAO's new activity isn't entirely a surprise, as its livestock specialists have elsewhere acted to reverse a common perception that a prescription for less livestock was built into their report "Livestock's Long Shadow" For example, its lead author and a co-author later wrote to prescribe more factory farming, not less, and no limit on meat.

Yet "Livestock's Long Shadow" may not be uniformly endorsed by the whole FAO, as it invited Jeff Anhang and me to present our analysis first at FAO headquarters in Rome, then in Berlin.

FAO's basic purpose is to "promote the common welfare" in a "neutral forum." However, FAO's new partnership includes only four wealthy countries, and no poor country. Yet the former director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which normally promotes livestock, expressed concern about the impacts of industrially-produced meat on the poor – saying that "factory-farmed" livestock eat grains "that might instead have fed people."

Factory farming was criticized even by a co-author of "Livestock's Long Shadow" Cornelius De Haan, when he was lead author of the World Bank's 2001 livestock strategy. That strategy pegged livestock's adverse impacts at a lower level than in the 2006 "Livestock's Long Shadow" — yet the World Bank strategy recommends that institutions should "avoid funding large-scale commercial, grain-fed feedlot systems and industrial milk, pork, and poultry production."

Conversely, the stated goal of Frank Mitloehner, chair of FAO's new partnership, is to promote intensified livestock production.

A new ILRI strategy concludes that "livestock is back on the global agenda," and that increased productivity must come from "intensified" systems. A videotape reveals a push for research to support ILRI's predetermined conclusions, as the new director general states: "How do we elevate the livestock game?…In the past we have not looked so much at the issue of food consumption in urban areas…A good bit of the negative criticism of livestock is its contribution to greenhouse gases and its very high environmental footprint – so we must develop stronger research responses to these challenges."

Evidence shows that ILRI may fear public acceptance of our widely cited assessment that livestock are responsible for at least 51 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas. ILRI was sufficiently concerned about acceptance of the 51 percent figure that it raised the issue with its annual meeting's participants before, during, and after its 2010 meeting – and found that acceptance of the 51 percent figure by the meeting's participants actually rose from about 1.5 percent before the meeting to about 7.5 percent after the meeting.

Yet "Livestock's Long Shadow" apparently undercounted by a large margin the amount of land used for livestock and feed production – estimating it at 30 percent of all land on earth, while ILRI has estimated it at 45 percent. Other gaps in "Livestock's Long Shadow" may have occurred because it was authored by livestock specialists – while international good practice in environmental assessment is to have projects with major environmental impacts (such as global livestock and feed production) be assessed by environmental assessment specialists.

The key difference between the 18 percent and 51 percent figures is that the latter accounts for how exponential growth in livestock production (now more than 60 billion land animals per year), accompanied by large scale deforestation and forest-burning, have caused a dramatic decline in the earth's photosynthetic capacity, along with large and accelerating increases in volatilization of soil carbon.

Agriculture is outdoors to a unique degree, exposing it to greater risk from emissions attributable to livestock than any other industry's risk from the same emissions. So food industry leaders have a compelling commercial incentive to reduce these emissions.

While the FAO and ILRI argue that millions of poor people have no alternative to raising livestock for their livelihoods, tens of millions of poor people's livestock have died in the past few years because of climate disasters. Replacing them would risk a similar fate for the new animals.

Conversely, replacing at least a quarter of today's livestock products with better alternatives would both reduce emissions and allow forest to regenerate on a vast amount of land, which could then absorb excess atmospheric carbon to reduce it to a safe level. This may be the only pragmatic way to reverse climate change in the next five years as needed. Sufficient renewable energy infrastructure is projected to take at least 20 years and $18 trillion to develop.

Substitutes for livestock products require no subsidies or offsets. Consumers can buy more of them tomorrow.

原文：FAO Yields to Meat Industry Pressure on Climate Change