The impact of the livestock on the global environment

🌊 Fish, Forests and the Food on Our Plates

We came across a feature on BBC World Service recently that genuinely made us put down our mugs of tea and listen properly. It was about the catastrophic decline of fish stocks off the coast of West Africa — a crisis quietly unfolding far from most people’s radar, threatening not just the livelihoods of fishermen across countries like Senegal, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, but the very nutrition of entire populations. Apparently, fish accounts for around 75% of the protein intake for people across the region. Seventy-five per cent. That’s not a dietary preference — that’s survival.

Now, before anyone reaches for the nearest climate change placard, this particular disaster has very little to do with global warming. This one is more straightforward and, in some ways, more depressing for it. The culprit is industrial overfishing — fleets of enormous factory vessels, many of them foreign-owned, hoovering up fish at a frankly staggering rate. A good portion of the catch gets shipped to vast processing plants in Mauritania — a country that sits right next door to Senegal on the Atlantic coast, and which has, in recent decades, become something of a hub for the fishmeal industry. There, the fish are ground down into powder. Fishmeal powder. This is then exported — much of it heading to China — where it’s used to feed farmed fish and livestock such as pigs.

So, just to be clear: fish that could be feeding people in West Africa are instead being turned into powder to feed other fish, which will then be eaten by people in wealthier parts of the world. You couldn’t make it up, could you.

It was partly stories like this one that informed our decision, about a year ago now, to go vegan. Yes, yes — we know. Another one. Bear with us. The environmental impact of global animal protein production was one of the central reasons we made that shift. It’s a complicated area, admittedly. There are plenty of conflicting studies about the precise effects of livestock farming on everything from carbon emissions to water use, and we’re not about to pretend otherwise. But when you hear something as concrete as what’s happening off the coast of Senegal — a real-world, empirical example of a food system eating itself alive — it’s hard to argue that something isn’t badly wrong.

That same week, as if one gloomy story weren’t quite enough, the BBC ran another piece on a related theme: the rapid expansion of soybean farming in Brazil and the environmental carnage that comes with it. This story had extra urgency given that Brazil had just elected Jair Bolsonaro as president in October 2018 — a far-right politician who, beyond his alarming views on the rights of women, indigenous peoples and minorities, had been fairly explicit about his plans to open up ecologically sensitive areas to agricultural development. One of his first acts in office was to merge the ministries of Agriculture and the Environment into a single body. A merger. Not exactly subtle signalling about which way the wind would blow.

Most people, when they think about deforestation in Brazil, picture the Amazon — and rightly so. But there’s another vast and extraordinary ecosystem at risk that rarely gets the attention it deserves: the Cerrado. It’s a sprawling tropical savanna that covers an area roughly the same size as Western Europe, sitting to the south and east of the Amazon basin. Ecologists have long considered it one of the most biodiverse places on the planet — home to an extraordinary range of wildlife and plant life, with around 40% of its species found nowhere else on Earth. And yet most people couldn’t point to it on a map.

The Cerrado has been burning. Literally. Swathes of it have been cleared through uncontrolled fires — some deliberately set — to make way for soybean cultivation. And that soy? Much of it ends up exported as animal feed. So the same chain repeats itself: forests and savannas are destroyed to grow crops, which are shipped abroad to fatten livestock, which end up on dinner plates on the other side of the world.

None of this is comfortable reading, we realise. But then, it probably shouldn’t be.