Fleshing out the problem of eating meat

Straits Times, March 11, 2008

UPFRONT
Fleshing out the problem of eating meat

• Poor hygiene at slaughterhouses
• Damage to environment
• Growing obesity problem

By Nirmal Ghosh, Thailand Correspondent

BANGKOK - BANGKOK-BASED Gunter Heinz has seen for himself, up close, compelling reasons to either not eat meat at all, or be very careful where you do.

In an upcoming report, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) expert on animal production notes 'severe shortcomings' in the region's slaughterhouses.

These range from animal welfare malpractices to bacterial contamination from 'lack of proper slaughtering and by-product handling facilities and careless slaughtering by workers'.

'Slaughterhouse waste disposal and effluent treatment, which is organised in an unsatisfactory way or not at all...contributes to the poor quality of slaughterhouse hygiene,' the report says.

In most Asian countries, there is an increasing tendency towards producing good quality chilled meat for domestic sales, Mr Heinz notes.

But such production accounts for, at the most, around 15 per cent of the overall meat market in some countries.

The rest is still provided by small- and medium-scale private-sector abattoirs, which supply 'warm' meat to markets without refrigeration.

Some of this meat even finds its way to modern supermarkets after being chilled - a dangerous practice because, after being contaminated to begin with by appalling hygiene at its origin, it undergoes prolonged storage.

'This is the sector where profound technical and hygienic improvements are needed in order to supply clean meat to consumers,' says Mr Heinz in his report.

Slaughterhouse standards in Myanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand appear relatively acceptable in terms of hygiene and slaughtering practices.

But conditions can range from acceptable to downright dangerous in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

Singapore was not part of the study.

The argument against meat consumption goes well beyond the immediate hazards.

The large-scale, commercial livestock industry today accounts for 18 per cent of greenhouse gases, including methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by land use change and the livestock's own gaseous emissions.

That is more than the amount produced by the transport sector, which accounts for about 12 per cent of greenhouse gases emitted worldwide. And it is growing.

Eating commercially produced and processed meat has created a recognised and growing obesity problem, which in some countries is already killing people prematurely and will soon overload public health-care systems with related illnesses like heart disease and cancer.

Yet more and more people are eating meat, especially in some formerly poor countries with vibrant economies and millions experiencing a new affluence.

Between the 1960s and the current decade, worldwide meat production has approximately quadrupled.

In the same period, per capita meat consumption has doubled - and will double again by 2050.

'Livestock's Long Shadow' - an extensive study of the livestock industry released last year by the FAO - concludes that the sector 'emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global'.

Livestock accounts for 40 per cent of the agricultural sector's gross domestic product and provides livelihood to upwards of a billion people worldwide.

But it has also taken over crop and forest land, destroying biodiversity and the ability of natural forests to absorb CO2.

Across the world, livestock is one of the greatest threats to natural forests and biodiversity. Some 70 per cent of previously forested land in South America's Amazon basin is now occupied by pastures.

The industry not only uses up increasingly scarce and precious fresh water in vast quantities, but is also a major polluter of fresh-water systems.

In the United States, where per capita meat consumption is roughly twice the global average, livestock accounts for an estimated 37 per cent of pesticide use, 50 per cent of antibiotic use, and a third of the nitrogen and phosphorus in fresh water resources.

The FAO has been calling for measures to reduce the environmental footprint of the industry. It may even be possible to reduce it by half - but the industry has to be willing or be forced to do it.
The alternative is grim.

The University of California at Irvine's Nathan Fiala, in a 2006 paper, noted: 'To produce 1kg of beef in the Netherlands requires 20.9 sq m of land just for feed and other inputs.

'If every person on the planet were to have the same level of meat consumption as the average (American), and all land was used at the same technological level as in the Netherlands, meat production alone would account for 30 per cent of all of the world's potentially arable land, at least four times as much as is currently used.'

nirmal@sph.com.sg

Link : http://www.straitstimes.com/Prime+News/Story/STIStory_215427.html