World Bank discusses livestock, Part 1: Environmental impact

How can livestock producers eliminate and/or pay for the air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, and other externalities related to meat production? That was the question of the day at a workshop at the World Bank on Tuesday, where participants gathered to discuss the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report Livestock’s Long Shadow, released late last year. The answer, obviously, isn’t a simple one. But there were some pretty insightful—and even surprising—responses from some of the world’s leading livestock experts.

Henning Steinfeld, lead author of the FAO report, explained that for industrial systems (i.e., factory farms), internalizing costs is “pretty straightforward.” He noted that big producers of chickens, eggs, pigs, and even dairy cows—the operations responsible for most of the farm animal pollution in Western Europe and the United States—can easily access their pollution loads and alleviate pollution problems at the source. Steinfeld also pointed out that if environmental regulations for confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) were enforced, producers wouldn’t have a problem adhering to them—they have the money, expertise, and technology to prevent contamination from the mountains of manure and other hazards that CAFOs produce.

Unfortunately, what these operations lack is the willingness to change. The workshop participants pointed out (more than once) that although investments in treatment technologies—such as composting waste to produce biogas and prevent methane emissions—would raise producer costs by only about 5 to 10 percent in most cases, livestock producers are still practicing business as usual.

This could change, however—especially as livestock's role in climate change is increasingly recognized. The FAO report found that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a share higher than that contributed by cars, SUVs, and other vehicles. In addition, livestock account for 37 percent of global emissions of methane, a GHG with 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and 65 percent of emissions of nitrous oxide, another powerful GHG, most of which comes from manure.

While livestock were mentioned only once in the highly publicized Stern Review on climate change last November and just briefly in the latest IPCC assessment released in May, there is a move to include GHG mitigation for livestock in the upcoming Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Bali this December.