Yet another high-profile institution has come out to say that we have to transition away from animal agriculture to lessen our impact on the planet, improve public health and avoid future pandemics. We look at the three recommendations from leading think tank Chatham House, with the backing of the UN, that point the finger firmly at the way we currently produce food.

If you haven’t heard of Chatham House, as think tanks go they’re one of the more famous and well-respected. Also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, royal charter and all, the brainboxes at Chatham House know a thing or two about the state of the world. So much so that its membership includes major corporations, governments (via their embassies) and NGOs like the Red Cross. So when Chatham House sends out a stark message with the blessing of the UN, it goes out to an impressive audience.

In a report released yesterday, called Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss, Chatham House set out three ‘levers’ or recommendations for reducing pressure on the environment by creating a more sustainable food system - all with the support of the UN environment programme (Unep).

According to the report: “Without reform of our food system, biodiversity loss will continue to accelerate. Further destruction of ecosystems and habitats will threaten our ability to sustain human populations. Reform will rely on the use of three principal levers.”

Quoting figures from the ‘Red List’, maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the report states that agriculture is the main threat to 86% of the 28,000 species known to be at risk of extinction, with cattle, sheep and other animal farming industries having the biggest impact on the environment, and also that “in marine ecosystems, fishing is the largest driver of biodiversity loss.”

The first recommendation is the one we’re most interested in, but it should be said that all of them are interdependent to an extent: “Firstly, global dietary patterns need to converge around diets based more on plants, owing to the disproportionate impact of animal farming on biodiversity, land use and the environment.”

‘Converging around diets based more on plants’ is the diplomatic way of saying that people should be eating fewer animals, and while the wording is somewhat safe and reducetarianist, they do state in the introduction that “more plant-based diets” should be encouraged. This isn’t the knock-out “go vegan right now” message that we all want as it could also be read as saying that we should be eating more plant-based meals more of the time, but to this we would always say that if they’re recommending more plant-based meals as a solution, why lessen that by only going partway. Surely 100 per cent plant-based is twice better than 50 per cent, or those of us in the world who can live vegan have a responsibility to do so to counterbalance those for whom veganism is not possible.

They go on to say: “Such a shift would also benefit the dietary health of populations around the world, and help reduce the risk of pandemics.” If this isn’t stating that animal agriculture contributes to poor health and emerging zoonotic diseases, we don’t know what is. In regard to pandemics, we’ve all been saying it since the first theories emerged about the coronavirus’s origins at a wet market where wild animals and humans were mixing and have an entire white paper looking at the causes of the 1918 flu, HIV/AIDs, SARS, MERS and essentially all the global outbreaks of modern times.

Now Chatham House has joined the CDC, FAO and other institutions in drawing attention to the role of animal exploitation in the emergence of new zoonoses: “It [Covid-19] is the latest in a series of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) to have reached epidemic or pandemic levels over recent decades; the majority of these EIDs have come from wild or farmed animals. Novel zoonoses are a predictable consequence of new and close contact between species caused by the expansion of agricultural land into natural ecosystems.”

The report’s second major recommendation is to set aside and protect more land for nature: “The protection of land from conversion or exploitation is the most effective way of preserving biodiversity, so we need to avoid converting land for agriculture.” This also applies to monoculture, that is farming of a single plant crop over large areas which is how most of our wheat, corn and other staples are grown. However, “a switch from beef to beans in the diets of the entire US population could free up 692,918 km2 – equivalent to 42 per cent of US cropland – for other uses such as ecosystem restoration or more nature-friendly farming.”

Not only would switching land away from animal agriculture free up space for other uses but “returning all permanent pasture worldwide to its native forest cover would store 72 gigatonnes of carbon.” Later stating: “The biggest potential for carbon sequestration through such ecosystem restoration efforts is concentrated in high-income and upper-middle-income countries, which account for 70 per cent of the carbon that would be sequestered by restoring land currently occupied by animal agriculture.”

The third recommendation affirms that a move away from all current intensive farming methods is very much needed: “We need to farm in a more nature-friendly, biodiversity-supporting way, limiting the use of inputs and replacing monoculture with polyculture farming practices.” Indeed there are myriad ways in which this can be done while forgoing the active and intentional exploitation of animals, with veganic agriculture proving successful in terms of food production, improvement of soil health and carbon sequestration.

However safely it’s being said, the message is clear. Agriculture in its current form, and in particular animal agriculture, is leading us down a path towards mass species extinction, chronic disease and future pandemics with the potential to be far more deadly than Covid-19 or indeed any of the global outbreaks that we’ve seen in modern history, all of which came from contact with animals. Chatham House is just one more in a long line of institutions to bring together the studies and the science to arrive at the same conclusion, the ever-growing consensus that we must shift our diets away from animal products. It’s getting ridiculous that people are still debating what the best minds we have are saying, or simply ignoring or finding excuses to carry on as we always have. Yes, governments are failing to act and change policy in line with every recommendation, but as consumers, we are also culpable. It is time to wake up or we will end up eating our way towards our own demise.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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