Editorial: Meat - the good and bad news

Photo / Hawke's Bay Today

Sheepmeat farmers - and politicians keen to increase our export earnings - would have been enormously cheered this week by the publication of figures showing that getting our lamb to northern-hemisphere markets is not an act of global-warming vandalism.

Farmers in Europe, the UK and North America have for several years been opportunistically exploiting the "food miles" argument against us.

They want their consumers to buy local on the grounds that it would be kinder to the planet than eating New Zealand lamb. But an AgResearch study, whose results were released this week, shoots that self-serving argument to ribbons.

The scientists analysed the total carbon footprint of getting a given New Zealand shank or striploin onto an English dinner table and discovered something interesting: hauling it around the world contributes only 5 per cent of the total carbon emissions, a figure more impressive when stacked up against the 7 per cent contributed by the shopper's drive home from the supermarket.

The timing might have seemed serendipitous, in the same week as the Global Research Alliance - an international group of nations who are co-operating in investigating ways to reduce carbon emissions from agriculture - met in Wellington.

The AgResearch analysis bears out what farmers have long been saying: that food miles are only a small part of the equation and that European and American sheepmeat production techniques have huge energy costs that farming of pasture-fed animals does not incur.

But the figures tell a darker story: 80 per cent of the carbon emissions are generated before the animals are even trucked out the farm gate.

In environmental terms, meat-eating is a costly luxury because raising meat consumes massively more energy, soil nutrients and water than growing equivalent protein in vegetable form.

The GRA is behind research initiatives designed to reduce the on-farm carbon footprint but there is no getting away from the fact that we all need to eat less meat.

The good news is that if we do, we can afford the better cuts. That's got to be good for the palate - and the planet.