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U.S.-China beef deal puts higher emissions on the menu.
The growing Chinese middle class has a love affair with beef, and it now has a new supplier. The deal could increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.
For the first time in 14 years, American beef will end up on Chinese dining tables, thanks to a trade deal finalized this week.
For a meat-loving Chinese middle class, this comes as good news. But the arrangement could lead to millions of tons of additional greenhouse gases from the United States' cattle industry, the world's largest beef producer, especially if Chinese beef consumption continues its expected climb.
The production of livestock accounts for more than 14 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, the third-largest contributor after energy production and transportation. Of all livestock, beef cattle are the most greenhouse gas-intensive, accounting for about 40 percent of all livestock-related emissions. That's largely because of the methane cattle emit when belching and the impact of feed production, which includes lands being converted for grazing or growing grain.
The Chinese government banned imports of American beef in 2003 after mad cow disease was discovered in some U.S. cattle herds. But the U.S. beef industry has pushed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop measures that persuaded the Chinese government to reopen its market. The final push came in the last couple of months, after President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss U.S.-China trade in April.
"Chinese consumption of beef is already on the rise. It's doubled over the past decade, and that's part of the reason they're interested in this," said Sujatha Bergen, a food and agriculture policy specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "They're needing to satisfy rising demand."
At the same time, appetites for beef in the U.S.—the world's fourth-largest consumer—have dropped.
"This is definitely a case where we don't want the U.S. exporting its bad habits," Bergen added. "Especially on an issue where we're doing a pretty good job."
According to figures crunched by NRDC earlier this year, the drop in U.S. beef consumption has had an appreciable impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the course of the last decade, American beef consumption declined 19 percent, leading to a reduction of 185 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to NRDC. Overall, changes in American dietary patterns—which include lower consumption of beef, orange juice, milk, pork and chicken—led to an emissions drop of 271 million tons over the decade. (Total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., by comparison, averaged about 6 billion tons a year over the same period.)
China emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, but the average Chinese citizen is responsible for less than half the contribution to climate change of the average American. Americans eat more beef, per capita, than any other country beside Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Still, China, the world's most populous country eats about a third of the meat produced globally, and that number will likely climb over the next couple of decades as consumption is projected to rise. Beef consumption alone could rise 47 percent by 2030.
The Chinese government's nutrition authority, meanwhile, is attempting to lower meat consumption in the country, setting a goal of halving meat consumption from current levels to 27 kilograms per person, per year. (The Chinese "food pagoda"—modeled after the U.S. Department of Agriculture's original food pyramid—advocates a plant-based diet.)
While the goal is aimed at cutting diseases related to high-fat diets, the environmental outcomes could be significant.
In a 2016 study, researchers found that cutting red meat consumption by 100 grams per day in 2050 could not only prevent 2.2 million deaths in China but cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than a billion metric tons. The same study found that switching to a plant-based diet could cut up to 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
It's unclear how much American beef production could rise in response to the reopened market and fresh demand, but it's clear it will go up. According to a letter the cattle industry's main trade group sent to Trump, China represents the market with the greatest growth potential for U.S. beef.
"I haven't seen specific projections for Chinese imports or the climate impact," Bergen said. "But, overall, if consumption continues its trajectory, it will be much harder to hit emissions targets."
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Tackling food waste as a way to save the climate, too.
Recycling the staggering amount of food that's wasted into livestock feed is increasingly being seen as a tool in the U.S. effort against climate change.
Recycling the staggering amount of food that's wasted into livestock feed is increasingly being seen as a tool in the U.S. effort against climate change.
BY GEORGINA GUSTIN
SEP 6, 2016
A staggering amount of food, estimated at $165 billion each year, is wasted in the U.S. Redirecting that waste into farm fodder, a simple but out-of-fashion practice, could greatly benefit the climate by reducing methane emissions. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
At his hog farm about a dozen miles from Las Vegas' famed strip, Bob Combs became a celebrity of sorts for hauling thousands of pounds of leftovers from casinos' all-you-can-eat buffets and feeding it to his 3,000 pigs.
Farmers used to call the practice "garbage feeding." Today, researchers see it as a tool for stemming climate change. That's because the growing amount of wasted food around the world adds methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere as it rots in landfills.
Combs just happened to be a pioneer recycler.
"These buffets, they generate so much waste," said Nicole Civita, director of the Food Recovery Project at the University of Arkansas School of Law. "They have to serve all kinds of food, a diversity. But the side effect of all that choice is there are lots of things we don't choose."
Casino diners in Las Vegas aren't the only ones to blame. Together, the world's food makers, farmers and consumers toss away one-third of all the food produced for human consumption.
If global food waste was a country, it would be the third-biggest greenhouse gas emitter after the U.S. and China. In the U.S., methane accounts for about 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—about a quarter of which comes from decomposing, uneaten food. If more supermarkets, restaurants and hotel chains redirected that waste into farm fodder, it could benefit not just the climate by reducing methane emissions, but also conserve the huge amount of resources that go into growing food for livestock.
"When we're talking about food waste going to animals, what we're talking about is to offset the food we feed to them," explained Dana Gunders, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). "That's the biggest climate benefit of feeding wasted food to animals. But on top of that you can benefit from it not decomposing in landfills."
It seems like a win-win-win situation. But a patchwork of restrictive state and federal laws means U.S. farmers rarely feed food scraps to livestock anymore. So Civita and her colleagues worked with Harvard University's Food Law and Policy Clinic to produce a report to help farmers revive this out-of-fashion practice.
The guide, called Leftovers for Livestock, helps steer waste-generators and farmers through the various laws that limit feeding scraps to farm animals. Many of those were passed after livestock diseases were linked to animal products in feed, notably mad cow disease in cattle and foot-and-mouth disease in swine. By 2007, the guide reports, only 3 percent of American hog farmers fed scraps to their animals.
"We needed to do this work to demystify all this so that people on the ground, producing our food, can actually make use of this more sustainable feed supply," Civita said. "Farmers are really busy people. We can't expect them to figure out these regs on their own."
The guide addresses just a small piece in the broader discussion of food waste, which has grown louder and more urgent in recent years. The issue has grabbed the attention of U.S. lawmakers, including Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), an organic farmer. In late 2015, she introduced a bill that would, among other things, tweak the laws pertaining to grocery "sell by" dates and expand tax breaks to encourage farmers, restaurants and retailers to donate food waste to food banks and shelters. Tossing food, Pingree said at a meeting in Washington, D.C this summer, is "viscerally something we know we shouldn't be doing."
But it's also morphing, at least in the public's awareness, from a moral no-no in a world where hunger is commonplace—a kind of collective ethical transgression—into a climate change issue (also a moral cause for many).
Gunders of NRDC did a comprehensive study of food waste in the U.S. in 2012 and found that food production consumes 10 percent of the country's energy budget, uses half of its land and consumes 80 percent of its fresh water. Americans throw out $165 billion in food a year, about 40 percent of the country's food—more than 20 pounds per person, per month.
"I kept saying, how can these numbers be true, and if they are, how can nobody be talking about them?" Gunders recalled. "But I think it's very safe to say that the level of attention and awareness has increased dramatically. The concern around food waste has gained a ton of traction."
Last year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture announced an ambitious goal: a 50 percent reduction in food waste by 2030, in line with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Across the country, cities are implementing food waste diversion programs, and entrepreneurs are entering the food waste business.
Governments and advocates in industrialized countries have aimed their waste-reduction initiatives largely at consumers. Increasingly, Civita and her colleagues say, farmers have expressed an interest in helping out on their side of the equation and cutting food losses before the food enters consumer channels.
"Farmers all around me said: For ages humans have had closed-loop food systems," Civita said. "But how do we do this legally?"
There are limitations beyond legal ones. Already much of the spent grains in the U.S.—like those used in brewing or distilling—go into animal feed, largely in big, industrialized operations. Most remaining food waste—our leftovers—is more difficult to convert into feed. Meanwhile, livestock producers have carefully calibrated the feed they give so that animals grow to exactly the right weight at the right pace, and wasted food may not represent the most efficient fodder.
"They say: It's going to cost me more in the long run," Civita said. "So we need to do a lot more to figure out how to do this more efficiently. Right now, we're talking about using leftovers as a supplement."
Civita and her colleagues haven't yet calculated the precise environmental impact of recycling food waste into livestock feed. In fact, research around food waste is so new, that the World Resources Institute, working with 200 or so global stakeholders, only this year released a standard measure of it.
"Food waste doesn't mean the same thing universally," explained Kai Robertson, who leads the institute's food loss and waste program. "It's difficult to manage what doesn't get measured, and because it's not that straightforward to measure food waste, this standard provides for a common framework."
Going forward, that standard could help waste generators measure how much they toss—and target better ways to reduce it.
The UN already estimates that diverting food waste into feed could free up enough land to feed 3 billion people, and a University of Cambridge study found that feeding food waste to pigs in the European Union could cut the amount of land used to grow pig feed (soybeans and corn) by 4.4 million acres. That report calculated that 600,000 of those acres are in Brazilian tropical forests and savannah, which are increasingly being cleared to grow animal feed.
"This feels like a silver bullet, but, of course, in a systems-based approach, there are no silver bullets. It's not quite that simple," Civita said. "Although, it gives you a sense of scope and scale. It gives you a sense of the possibility."
At the very least, the practice saves money. The MGM Grand Buffet increased its food donations from about 3,350 tons in 2007 to 14,000 tons in 2011, according to Civita's report, and 20 percent of that went to Combs' farm, where it fed about 3,000 hogs.
"They take that food and immediately put in back in the food system, utilizing excess to substantially increase the efficiency of producing pork," Civita said. "That's a pretty good solution."
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