Animals
Is Livestock the New Oil?
A leading investment bank says the livestock industry is “looking as precarious as oil” as a result of Covid-19. Both industries are under extreme pressure: oil from the huge drop in demand; the livestock industry from the supply chain shocks of slaughterhouse shutdowns, infected workers, product shortages and the slaughter of millions of animals on farms. In an outlook for commodities in 2021 and beyond, Goldman Sachs says the damage from the pandemic will be difficult to recover from.
Food
How Do You Like Your Steak? Hot Off the Press!
3D printing your steak could be the latest game changer in the plant-based food revolution. The plan is for this alt-meat product, from Redefine Meat (Israel), to be tested in high-end restaurants soon and in supermarkets next year. A proprietary 3D printer uses plant-based ingredients to form, in layers, a realistic looking steak. The company works with chefs and food scientists to duplicate the taste, texture, colour and juiciness of real steak. The product uses 90% less water, 95% less land and emits 90% less CO2 than beef.
the Climate Crisis
Three Years Left to Fix This
Energy experts warn we have three years to engineer a green transition or miss our long-term climate goals. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA), green recovery plan is a blueprint for policy makers and businesses to invest $3 trillion globally by 2023 that will save or create nine million jobs. It calls for the greening of power generation, transport, industry, fuels and low-carbon technology. “The next three years will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond,” said Fatih Birol, head of the IEA. www.iea.org
speaking words of wisdom
“To avoid causing the next pandemic, the meat industry must tackle lax safety standards for food and workers alike, closely confined animals and overused antibiotics. This will disrupt a supply chain already cracking from fundamental land, water and emissions constraints.” — Jeremy Coller, Founder of FAIRR and CIO of Coller Capital
“On the other side is not something new, but something that calls from the past — a world in which farmers were not myths, tortured bodies were not food and the planet was not the bill at the end of the meal.” — Jonathan Safran Foer, best-selling author
Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media
perspective
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Meat Industry Faces Growing Global Pressure
Governments, regulators, investors and consumers are taking a long hard look at the nature and viability of the meat industry in the wake of multiple failures exacerbated by Covid-19.
The shutdown of slaughterhouses around the world due to infected and dying meat plant workers continues to be front page news globally. Most recently, in Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia’s Gütersloh district sent 640,000 people back to lockdown after 1,700 slaughterhouse workers tested positive. There have also been recent closures at meat packing plants in Brazil and Ireland, in addition to earlier shutdowns at plants in the US, Canada, Australia, Spain, the UK and elsewhere.
Germany has just brought in €30,000 fines for violations of labour standards at meat packing plants, and the EU has announced an investigation into live animal transport regulations and practices within and beyond the 27-nation trading area. China recently stopped the import of chicken products from US food giant Tyson as part of its renewed pandemic restrictions. UK regulators are looking at restrictions on new factory farms due to local opposition and concerns about meeting climate targets. And governments around the world are concerned about the security of the food supply system.
The industry is vulnerable to new regulations designed to prevent or contain the next crisis and investors are taking note. The $20 trillion FAIRR investor network www.fairr.org warns that the industry faces a growing number of significant financial risks.
“Regulatory conversations are already taking place across Europe and the US, focusing on several core themes including breaking up industry consolidation, implementing moratoriums on factory farms, banning live export, limiting antibiotic use, and overhauling biosecurity containment and surveillance practices,” says Jeremy Coller, founder of FAIRR and Chief Investment Officer at Coller Capital.
In a new report called “An Industry Infected: Animal Agriculture in a Post-Covid World”, FAIRR cites the growing awareness that the factory farming-slaughterhouse system embodies a wide range of risks including worker health and safety, potential pathways for zoonotic diseases, the threat of contributing to future pandemics, high GHG emissions, large environmental footprints, its role in deforestation and its significant contribution to the rise of antibiotic resistance. “The industrialized model of animal production has been optimized to prioritize both cost and production efficiency, at the expense of multiple other factors including worker safety, biosecurity and ultimately, resilience.”
So, what is the outlook for the industry and the security of the food supply system?
Photo: Pulse Canada
“In the medium term, a shift to more sustainable plant-based proteins offers resilience where animal protein production has failed. Plant-based proteins are more efficient to produce, can be scaled up or down to meet market demand in a matter of days and don’t have the disease risks associated with livestock,” the FAIRR report says.
Consumers are increasingly open to plant-based alternatives, with sales rising sharply across many markets including North America, Europe and China. Recent surveys in the US and UK show that more than half of consumers are willing to try plant-based meat alternatives and reduce their consumption of red meat. Market researchers agree that the pandemic has strengthened recent trends in favour of plant-based foods. Potentially even more worrying for the industry, is a new finding that the pandemic is significantly raising awareness of the meat industry’s poor track record on worker health and safety, and animal welfare.
“Covid is shining a light for consumers to start evaluating their own choices and whether or not they want to continue to buy meat,” said Josh Balk, vice-president of farm animal protection at the US Humane Society, in an interview with Bloomberg.
The FAIRR report says additional risks for the industry – aside from the pandemic continuing to disrupt the animal protein supply chain — is that many plant-based foods are starting to compete directly on price. And that retailers and manufacturers are expected to increase their use of plant-based proteins to reduce supply chain risks.
FAIRR has issued a Pandemic Ranking showing that companies in the meat industry are doing “far too little to measure and manage pandemic risk.” The report says 44 (out of 60) companies, valued at $224 billion, are deemed high risk (worst performers). Other findings include, more than three-quarters of the companies are categorized as high risk for their track records on: waste and pollution (94% of companies); deforestation and biodiversity (88%); and, antibiotics (77%).
The multiple failures of the meat industry have given rise to all of these pressures and it appears the future security of our food supply will increasingly rely on the growth of plant-based food systems and on consumers making different choices.
on The horizon
Photo: Stephen Walker on Unsplash
Canada: A New Plant-Based Protein Superpower
With the significant upswing in demand for plant-based foods, spurred on by the pandemic, Canadian farmers and food innovators are well positioned to be big winners in the food revolution.
Canada is one of the largest pea protein producers and the largest canola producer globally and several prairie companies have signed production deals with big food companies such as Nestle and Beyond Meat that are leading the charge in plant-based foods. The opportunity is a marriage of demand for new products from new markets, deep experience in crop farming, and hi-tech production methods. And farming techniques with a lower environmental footprint are also part of this winning formula.
The French agri-food giant Roquette, is building a $400 million pea protein production facility in Manitoba to fulfill a three-year supply contract with Beyond Meat. Nestle has a contract with Merit Functional Foods, which is also building a new plant in Manitoba, to supply pea and canola proteins for their plant-based food products in Europe. They join other plant-based protein companies in Alberta and Saskatchewan, including Verident Foods founded by Canadian movie director James Cameron.
These companies are using proprietary fractionator technology to better separate protein from starch and fibre for use in products like plant-based burgers, and almond and pea milks. Many of these companies are supported by a robust Canadian government funding program (Merit has just received $100 million in federal support for their new plant), as part of the “plant protein supercluster” business-government partnership designed to support a transition in agriculture to more sustainable food production.
National Research Council of Canada says Canada has strong potential to become the world’s “protein basket”. Source: NRCC
Demand for pea protein has grown by 13% since 2017, driven by consumer trends to plant-based protein alternatives to meat, according to Farm Credit Canada. Human consumption of pea protein is expected to double by 2024. Prairie provinces in Canada are planting 4.3 million acres of peas this year.
The overall global plant-based protein market was more than US$8 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach US$15 billion by 2023. The traditional market for these products is animal feed sold as a raw commodity, much of it exported. These new companies are moving up the value chain to manufacture food ingredients in Canada, attracting international investment and creating higher value technology and manufacturing jobs.
Researchers see new opportunities in lentils, fava beans and canola. For example, pasta made with 25% lentils lowers the food’s carbon footprint by 25%, increases protein by 25% and fibre by 100%. And given that companies like Beyond Meat make environmental claims about water usage, GHG emissions and energy consumption, Canadian farmers are well positioned to provide specific data about point of origin and production methods to verify these claims. This is another competitive advantage for Canadian producers in the growing global market for plant-based proteins.
calls to ban live animal exports
A campaign calling for a ban on the live animal export trade took off on social media last month. Timed for the fifth annual Ban Live Exports: International Awareness Day on June 14, and organized by well-respected animal protection groups including Compassion In World Farming and Animal Equality. The campaign generated over 103,000 #BanLiveExports tweets in 36 countries which were viewed 31 million times.
Two billion live animals are exported around the globe every year — usually in appalling conditions. There is growing public awareness of the plight of these animals and pressure is growing on governments and regulators to at least uphold the minimum standards of animal welfare. Two recent reports issued by the European Commission found widespread non-compliance by exporters with EU animal welfare laws, and regular failures by member states to enforce the legislation intended to protect animals during the long export journeys. The EU has now announced it will investigate the regulations and practices within and beyond the 27-nation trading area.
Photo: Planet Friendly News
Good news
Conservationists, entrepreneurs and fishers around the world are working together in the fight against “ghost gear”. Abandoned fishing gear catches and kills more than 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals and turtles every year. (For more detail on the scale of the destruction, see Charting Our Future below.) But now small businesses in fishing communities are removing abandoned fishing gear from the ocean and recycling these almost indestructible plastics into new products. These include surfboards in India, swimwear in the UK, volleyball nets in Brazil, and fabrics in Pakistan. Fishers have an incentive to clean up this marine debris as it fouls their boats and nets at sea and reduces their catch. The recycling and manufacturing also creates jobs in their communities. www.weforum.org
China has removed pangolin scales from the list of ingredients approved for use in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and upgraded the protection of pangolins to the highest level. Animal advocacy groups view the move as a key step in curbing the trade of this shy little mammal — the most trafficked animal in the world. An estimated 200,000 pangolins are consumed every year for their scales and meat in Asia, and they are a possible suspect for the transmission of Covid-19 from animals to humans.
A finding from a recent survey of US consumers found 23 percent are eating more plant-based meats. This is about twice the percentage who say they are eating more meat. “Plant-based meat has grown a lot relative to this period last year,” said Jen Lamy, sustainable seafood manager at The Good Food Institute. www.gfi.org
data points
Despite warnings about the threat to human health from the overuse of antibiotics in factory farms, a report from the “Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics” — comprising medical experts, environmentalists and animal advocates — says animals on US farms, on average, have been receiving dosages more than five times higher than farm animals in the UK. See our recent blog on this vitally important topic. https://www.planetfriendlynews.com/blog/the-threat-that-could-end-modern-medicine
Photo: Scott Bauer, Wikimedia Commons
2. A report by the US Institute For Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) says GHG emissions from the 13 biggest dairy companies in the world are equal to those of the UK — the world’s sixth largest economy. Ninety percent of these emissions are produced by the cows themselves, mostly in the form of methane, one of the most potent GHGs. “Few of these companies are even reporting their emissions”, Shefali Sharma, director at IATP and report author, told The Guardian. Research shows that all plant-based milks result in far fewer emissions than dairy milk. www.theguardian.com
3. According to the World Resources Institute, the tropics lost 11.9 million hectares of tree cover in 2019 — nearly one-third of which was primary forests. This is the equivalent of losing a football pitch of primary forest every six seconds. On a brighter note, Columbia, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire experienced notable declines in their primary forest loss. www.wri.org
climate connection
These articles are adapted from The Climate Beat, the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic initiative committed to more and better climate coverage.
A decade of data shows that high heat and pollution pose a significant risk to pregnancy, according to a new investigation in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Guardian reports. Across 32 million births since 2007, heat and pollution were risk factors 84% of the time and contributed to higher incidences of early birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth; Black mothers were especially at risk. “Reducing air pollution and fighting climate change is a matter of [children’s] survival and health,” the investigation’s author says.
A report last week from the International Energy Agency details how big government spending and reduced carbon emissions—“two of the defining narratives of 2020,” Bloomberg Green writes—could together create an “unprecedented” opportunity to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees C. The report focuses on specific policies that would create jobs, reduce poverty, and “make 2019 the definitive peak in global emissions,” all on the way to pulling the world out of the Covid-19 economic slump.
Even when oil drillers leave communities, what they leave behind may remain poison, Reuters reports. Around the world, abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other pollutants into the air and water—a threat to public safety and the climate alike. In the US alone, more than three million abandoned wells are estimated to emit hundreds of kilotons of methane into the atmosphere each year, and that’s according to data the Environmental Protection Agency believes is incomplete.
charting our path
The Terrible Toll On Marine Life Taken by Ghost Gear
Source: www.oliveridleyproject.org
Abandoned fishing gear, known as “ghost gear” is one of the biggest threats to marine life. Up to 800,000 tons of ghost gear is left in the ocean each year – more than one ton every minute. Ghost gear is the deadliest form of marine debris and more than 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals, turtles and seabirds get caught annually in abandoned or lost fishing nets, lines and traps. Made of durable plastics, ghost gear can take up to 600 years to break down. www.ghostgear.org But there are global efforts underway to remove and recycle some of this plastic pollution from the oceans. See our story in “Good News” above.
Editor’s note: As the pandemic rages on — even as (or maybe because) people are trying to return to some semblance of life pre-Covid — we don’t have the luxury of putting aside other issues plaguing the planet. This is always the danger when one news story dominates but this newsletter and the blogs on our website www.planetfriendlynews.com will continue to take a wider angle and stay focused on the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, the food system and animal protection efforts. Scientists and health experts are urging us to heed the warnings that abuses in these areas have led to our current predicament. Many of them assert time is running out but, thankfully, they also agree it is not too late to turn things around.