This story was originally published by the Star Tribune.
During the 2021 drought, nearly 800 Minnesota farmers with high-capacity wells pumped 6.5 billion more gallons of water than their permits allowed, state records show.
Farms on land owned or operated by R.D. Offutt Co., a potato-growing giant that has become one of the biggest water users in the state, were responsible for 23 percent of the excessive pumping.
“That’s quite a bit of overuse,” said Randall Doneen, a section manager for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “We’re trying to get people back into compliance.”
The overpumping in 2021 put more stress on already depleted aquifers, lakes, and streams and raised the risk that neighboring wells would run dry.
A Star Tribune review of water permit data reported each year to the DNR found more than three of four water users who violated their permits were agricultural irrigators. But they are unlikely to face fines or other consequences because of laws that the DNR says are too lenient. Many irrigators may not even have to pay for the extra water they used, based on the tiered fee system the state charges heavy users.
In some cases, farmers needed to go over their permits to keep their crops alive, said Jake Wildman, president of the Irrigators Association of Minnesota.
“Nobody wants to have to pump as much we did,” Wildman said. “We all understand rules and regulations are there for a reason. We all want to follow them. I truly believe we did the best we could with the tools we had and climate we were given.”
The permit violations on R.D. Offutt farms is particularly concerning to neighbors and water quality advocates, because many of them are located in the Pineland Sands region of central Minnesota. The same sandy porous soil that makes the land attractive for growing potatoes also makes it vulnerable to pollution.
When too much water is drawn from the ground for crops, it allows pollutants to seep into the soil, potentially contaminating drinking water.
Based in Fargo and founded 60 years ago, R.D. Offutt is one of the largest potato growing operations in the world. Much of their produce is cut into French fries, and the company is a major supplier to McDonalds restaurants.
It rapidly expanded in Minnesota in the past two decades. Many forests and timberlands in the Pineland Sands area, which covers parts of Hubbard, Wadena, Cass, and Becker counties, were cleared and turned into irrigated cropland.
By 2018, the company’s growth concerned DNR officials to the point that the agency stopped approving its well permit applications. The DNR said a comprehensive study was needed to find out whether increased water use was drying up lakes and streams, or hurting water quality in wells in the region. R.D. Offutt had dozens of pending well applications at the time.
Rather than fund the study, the company reached a deal with the DNR that withdrew all but five permit applications. The DNR asked lawmakers to fund the study. They did not, and it was never done.
By 2021, R.D. Offutt was the registered landowner or agent of more than 650 high-capacity well permits in the state. Together, those farms pumped 22 billion gallons of water — about 2.5 billion more than was used by the entire city of Minneapolis’ water treatment plant, which serves about 500,000 people.
The overuse was a result of just how bad the 2021 drought was, R.D. Offutt spokeswoman Jennifer Maleitzke said. It was the state’s most severe dry spell since at least 1988.
“Without measurable rainfall, farmers like us relied on irrigation to make sure crops across the state survived and there were no disruptions to the food supply chain,” she said.
In the years before the drought, R.D. Offutt farms complied with their permits. Less than 1 percent of the company’s permit holders went over their limit in 2020 and 2019.
“Every single growing season is different,” Maleitzke said. “We take our responsibility seriously to preserve the water supply in Minnesota, and we’ve made significant investments during our 60 years of farming potatoes to do just that.”
The overuse shows how irrigators and high-capacity water users face few repercussions if they violate a permit, said Mike Tauber, who lives in the Pineland Sands region in Backus, Minn., and has helped organize petitions demanding in-depth water quality studies.
“They’re thumbing their nose at the agencies,” Tauber said.
Everyone with a permit to draw more than 1 million gallons of water a year is required to report how much water they use. But that reporting is largely done on the honor system. There are no compliance checks.
The city of Blaine opened three new wells and pumped millions of gallons in 2021 and 2022 without getting permits. The DNR learned about it only after 141 nearby private well owners complained about running dry.
Blaine, too, likely won’t face any fines. Lawmakers have given the DNR few ways to penalize anyone that violates the permits.
The DNR could issue an “administrative penalty” ranging up to $20,000, depending on the severity of the breach. But the fine would be forgiven as soon as the user comes into compliance, Doneen said.
The DNR only typically issues a penalty in the most egregious cases, Doneen said. He doesn’t except any fines to be issued for farmers who overpumped during the drought.
But dry spells are precisely when the state should be more aggressive in protecting water supplies, said Carrie Jennings, research and policy director at the St. Paul-based Freshwater Society.
“That’s the critical time when you would want to do it,” she said.
DNR administrators have asked lawmakers in each of the last two years to allow them to increase the fines they can impose on permit violations. A bill in the House would let the agency fine up to $40,000. The agency also would get more discretion over whether fines are forgiven.
“The tools we have aren’t what we need,” said Bob Meier, assistant DNR commissioner.
Permit holders that exceeded the limits would still need to pay the same tiered water-use rates as everyone else. All permit holders pay $140 a year to pump up to 50 million gallons of water. They’re charged $3.50 for every million gallons after that. The price rises again after 100 million.
The average R.D. Offutt permit that was violated had a limit of 43 million gallons in 2021. Those that went over, but still pumped less than 50 million gallons, wouldn’t have to pay any more than the $140 minimum. The users that exceeded the permits did so by an average of 10 million gallons. If they were only permitted to pump 43 million gallons, those users would need to pay an extra $10.50 — roughly the cost of a Big Mac with large fries.
This story was shared with permission through the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri.
What do we do about the coming phosphorus crisis? In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert details the troubling paradox of the chemical element that, as she reminds readers, Isaac Asimov called “life’s bottleneck.” On the one hand, we’re slowly running out of the phosphorus needed for the fertilizer on which our agricultural system depends. That’s plenty scary on its own! On the other, phosphorus-rich runoff is poisoning our waterways. That’s because the fertilizer turbocharges certain types of toxic algae that can cause serious health problems in humans. Then, when the algae die, “their decomposition sucks oxygen out of the water, creating aquatic dead zones where almost nothing can survive.” (If you’re curious about what this looks like and what it means for coastal communities, check out the photo essay on algal blooms that TNR published in 2019.)
Kolbert explores several different contributors to the phosphorus crisis and an array of ways to ameliorate it. “If every bit of manure on the planet were recycled—cows, pigs, and chickens produce some four billion tons annually—it could cut the demand for mined phosphorus by half,” she notes. “Of course, even in this best-case scenario, the problem would be only half solved.” She reviews other ideas, from human “peecycling” to filtering phosphorus out of wastewater; eliminating corn-based biofuels, which are both highly subsidized and suck up “something like ten percent of all fertilizer” in the United States; and reducing food waste, which would in turn reduce the need for fertilizer.
But there’s another possible solution that came to mind while reading Kolbert’s piece.
The Guardian’s Damian Carrington on Monday reported the results of a new study from researchers at Columbia University and the Environmental Defense Fund, showing that “emissions from the food system alone will drive the world past 1.5 Celsius of global heating, unless high-methane foods are tackled.” High-methane foods means meat—specifically, meat from ruminants.
On the face of it, this news only adds to the sense of existential crisis hovering over our food system. But the study contained a ray of hope: “The temperature rise,” Carrington wrote, “could be cut by 55% by cutting meat consumption in rich countries to medically recommended levels, reducing emissions from livestock and their manure, and using renewable energy in the food system.” Breaking that down, Carrington notes that “if people adopted the healthy diet recommended by Harvard medical school, which allows a single serving of red meat a week, the rise could be cut by 0.2C,” a staggering result for a behavioral change that is logistically much easier than, say, switching en masse to long-underfunded public transit systems, or updating the energy grid to allow for more renewable energy generation, or creating a domestic electric vehicle and lithium battery industry, as the Inflation Reduction Act seeks to do. And this shift wouldn’t mean abandoning the pursuit of equity: “Such a diet would mean a big cut in meat eating in rich nations but could mean an increase in some poorer countries,” Carrington notes.
Reducing animal agriculture, in addition to helping meet climate targets, could also help reduce our phosphorus use and runoff. Corn is typically estimated to account for over 40 percent of U.S. commercial fertilizer use. Only 30 percent of corn gets processed into ethanol (the biofuel Kolbert is talking about), whereas about half becomes animal feed. Alfalfa, another phosphorus-consuming crop, which accounts for over 4 percent of total cropland in the U.S. (it’s also disproportionately contributing to the Southwestern water crisis), likewise goes into cattle bellies. If we eat less meat, we’ll need less corn and alfalfa to feed the animals and thus less phosphorus to fertilize those crops. Recycling those animals’ manure and using it in lieu of mined phosphate fertilizer may be worthwhile as well, but surely a more efficient solution—both from a runoff and an emissions standpoint—would be to reduce the raw demand.
But I don’t know how we get there. Animal agriculture has historically propelled much of America’s dysfunctional subsidy system, skewing agriculture toward practices that damage both human and planetary health, as detailed in Michael Pollan’s critically acclaimed 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s one of the more obvious targets for reform, since meat consumption, as previously mentioned, is comparatively easy to reduce relative to other climate-friendly changes. But as TNR regular Jan Dutkiewicz has repeatedlypointed out, getting people to eat less meat—or even less of one particular type of meat, like beef—is really, really hard. Every time anyone suggests it, people (and Fox News) completely lose their brisket.
TNR’s climate desk has published a couple of ideas on this front over the past few years, from changing the way media covers food to expanding and building on the success of community-led Meatless Mondays. Some people see promise in new meat substitutes, like Impossible Burgers or lab-grown meat. Others may find it helpful to reconnect to traditional foodways—which, contrary to our perception of meat as central to culinary traditions, didn’t involve as much habitual meat consumption because people simply didn’t have access. In presenting “the climate case for rationing” last week, Kate Aronoff pointed out another possible approach. Manyargue that rationing in World War II led to one of the healthiest national diets the United Kingdom has ever seen.
Whichever approach you favor—and note that none of these are asking people to forgo hamburgers permanently and forever—something has to give. At the rate we’re going, the food system will break. We can sit on our hands until that happens or take steps now to head off a civilizational catastrophe.
Good News
On Saturday, after a decade of talks, U.N. negotiators finally reached agreement on a treaty to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans.
Bad News
Ocean spray can contaminate coastal communities with E. coli, norovirus, and salmonella, thanks to the sewage routinely dumped into waterways, a new study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds.
Stat of the Week
That’s the percentage of the world’s population that remained free from harmful levels of air pollution in 2019, according to new modeling published in The Lancet. In other words: Almost the entire global population is being subjected to air pollution above the World Health Organization’s suggested limits.
NPR has a nice little listicle this week offering readers a guide for evaluating so-called climate “solutions” and distinguishing real ones from corporate greenwashing. It’s a good balance between optimism and rigor, which can be a tricky one to strike on this topic. Recommendations include, “Think about who’s selling you the solution” and asking yourself (or the person hawking the solution), “Is it available and scalable now?” Most importantly, it encourages readers not to ignore the big solution staring us all in the face:
It may sound basic, but one big way to address climate change is to reduce the main human activity that caused it in the first place: burning fossil fuels.
Scientists say that means ultimately transitioning away from oil, coal and gas and becoming more energy efficient. We already have a lot of the technology we need to make this transition, like solar, wind, and batteries, [Harvard historian of science Naomi] Oreskes says.
“What we need to do right now is to mobilize the technologies that already exist, that work and are cost competitive, and that essentially means renewable energy and storage,” she says.
This article first appeared in Apocalypse Soon, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
As much of the world reeled from high energy and food prices that left millions struggling to heat their homes and feed their families, commodity trading firms that benefit from extreme market volatility brought in record-breaking profits in 2022, capitalizing on chaos spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Citing new research from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the Financial Timesreported Sunday that the commodity trading industry “made record gross profits of more than $115 billion from trading activities last year.”
That total is up 60% compared to 2021, with the independent trading houses Trafigura, Vitol, and Glencore among the biggest beneficiaries, the Financial Times noted.
“Financial players such as hedge funds also enjoyed big gains, earning an estimated $12 billion from trading activities in 2022 compared with less than $3 billion the year before,” the newspaper added.
Ernst Frankl, a partner at Oliver Wyman and one of the report’s authors, told the Financial Times that 2022 “was a bit of a perfect storm across all the commodities, from a trading opportunity perspective.”
“Volatility is the lifeblood of what traders need in order to trade,” Frankl said.
Nick Dearden, director of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, expressed disgust at traders’ booming profits in the midst of worsening cost-of-living crises.
u201cAs we suffer a #CostOfLivingCrisis, food, energy and financial corporations made record profits of $115bn gambling on the basics of life. u201cVolatility is the lifeblood of what traders need in order to trade.u201d 1/2 https://t.co/AmHtYSL35Ku201d
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wreaked havoc on global energy and food markets, disrupting the supply of wheat and other key crops for countries that rely heavily on Ukrainian exports.
Negotiators are currently working to extend a United Nations-backed agreement that has allowed Ukraine to export grain from key ports that Russia blockaded. The initiative is set to expire on March 18.
“To all the leaders in the world, we need to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative,” World Food Program (WFP) executive director David Beasley said last month. “It must be renewed at all costs. Ukraine alone feeds 400 million people around the world.”
The WFP projects that more than 345 million people will be “food insecure” this year, more than double the 2020 number.
Experts have argued that commodity speculators are not only benefiting from extreme market volatility—they’re to some degree causing major price swings that have real-world consequences.
“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, toldMongabay last year.
In an October letter to the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) wrote that “while American families are struggling with rising prices, Wall Street traders are raking in record profits trading these very commodities.”
“This kind of speculation in the commodities markets,” the lawmakers warned, “has a direct impact on everyday people.”
As pandemic-era emergency SNAP benefits expire, millions of Americans face food insecurity
Environmental groups on Tuesday accused the Biden administration of putting the profits of big agribusiness over public health and critical pollinators by attempting to obstruct the Mexican government’s ongoing push to ban genetically engineered corn.
“The U.S.’s shameful efforts to strong-arm Mexico into accepting GE corn it has rejected is nothing short of 21st-century imperialism,” Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity. “Our government is working tirelessly to pad the multibillion-dollar profits of domestic agribusiness corporations by pushing GE corn, even though our glyphosate-drenched GE cornfields are playing an outsized role in driving catastrophic declines in vital pollinator populations.”
The group’s statement came after Mexico issued a new decree earlier this week that scraps the country’s original January 2024 deadline to halt imports of GMO corn for livestock feed and industrial use, a move widely seen as a concession to the U.S., which has been pressuring its southern neighbor to drop the ban since Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) first announced it in 2020.
But Mexico—the largest destination for U.S. corn exports—reiterated its intention to prohibit GE corn for human consumption by 2024 in its latest decree. Mexico is also aiming to ban imports and use of glyphosate, a cancer-linked chemical that is often sprayed on genetically engineered corn.
The new decree instructs Mexican authorities to “revoke and refrain from granting permits for the release into the environment in Mexico of genetically modified corn seeds.”
Mexican officials have repeatedly argued that GE corn and the associated use of glyphosate pose threats to human health and pollinators, as well as domestic production.
“We have to put the right to life, the right to health, the right to a healthy environment ahead of economic and business [interests],” Víctor Suárez Carrera, Mexico’s undersecretary of food and competitiveness, toldReuters in 2021.
Viridiana Lázaro, food and agriculture campaigner at Greenpeace Mexico, said Tuesday that “the ban of GE corn is the first step to transform Mexico’s agriculture system from one industrialized, based on pesticides, and dependent on transnational corporations to an agro-ecological system that offers solutions to soil fertility, local pest problems, allows crop diversification, and protects biodiversity and health of farmers and consumers.”
“To carry out the gradual substitution of genetically modified corn for animal feed and industrial corn for human consumption, as is stated in the new decree, is a broad challenge and, in order to ensure that it does not remain only on paper, public policies aimed at the agroecological transition must be issued in order to achieve it,” Lázaro continued. “Also, we must ensure that glyphosate and GE corn do not improperly end up in dough and tortillas, which studies have demonstrated has happened before.”
“The United States has refused to respect Mexico’s choice, instead working tirelessly to bully the country into accepting GE corn in order to protect the short-term profits of U.S. agribusiness giants.”
The U.S. government claims that Mexico’s plans, which have also drawn fierce opposition from industry lobbying groups, would run afoul of provisions in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and harm American farmers. The Biden administration has threatened to take legal action under the USMCA if Mexico doesn’t reverse course.
The USMCA entered into force in 2020 and replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), under which U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market.
In a statement on Tuesday, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said he is “disappointed” that Mexico is still pushing ahead with its proposed ban on genetically modified corn. An estimated 90% of U.S. corn production is genetically modified.
“The U.S. believes in and adheres to a science-based, rules-based trading system and remains committed to preventing disruptions to bilateral agricultural trade and economic harm to U.S. and Mexican producers,” Vilsack added. “We are carefully reviewing the details of the new decree and intend to work with [the United States Trade Representative] to ensure our science-based, rules-based commitment remains firm.”
Tom Haag, president of the National Corn Growers Association, a lobbying group, declared that “singling out corn—our number one ag export to Mexico—and hastening an import ban on numerous food-grade uses makes USMCA a dead letter unless it’s enforced.”
This week’s back-and-forth between the U.S. and Mexico marks a significant escalation in the yearslong trade dispute over the proposed ban on GE corn and glyphosate.
In February 2021, The Guardianreported that “internal government emails reveal Monsanto owner Bayer AG and industry lobbyist CropLife America have been working closely with U.S. officials to pressure Mexico into abandoning its intended ban on glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer that is the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkillers.”
The Center for Biological Diversity noted in a Tuesday press release that “the United States has, for months, exerted heavy pressure on Mexico to accept U.S.-produced corn that is genetically engineered to withstand what would normally be a deadly dose of pesticides.”
“Corn’s historical role in Mexican diets and culture—and current concerns about the impacts of glyphosate and genetic contamination of Mexico’s many varieties of heirloom corn—prompted its leaders to ban GE corn for human consumption and phase out glyphosate,” the group added. “The United States has refused to respect Mexico’s choice, instead working tirelessly to bully the country into accepting GE corn in order to protect the short-term profits of U.S. agribusiness giants.”
Hunger is expected to soar across the United States next month when more than 30 million people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program see their food benefits slashed significantly.
“This hunger cliff is coming to the vast majority of states, and people will on average lose about $82 of SNAP benefits a month,” Ellen Vollinger, director for SNAP at the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), toldCBS News on Friday. “That is a stunning number.”
As the outlet reported: “That means a family of four could see their monthly benefit cut by about $328 a month. The worst-hit could be elderly Americans who receive the minimum monthly benefit, Vollinger said. They could see their SNAP payments tumble from $281 to as little as $23 per month.”
Since a federal public health emergency was first declared at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, so-called emergency allotments have boosted food benefits nationwide.
Republican lawmakers in 18 states chose to eliminate their emergency allotments early. Many tried to justify the move by pointing to the recovery from the coronavirus-driven economic crisis, but research shows that demand at food banks has surged in states that spurned extra federal aid.
The remaining 32 states that have continued to provide enhanced food benefits will be forced to eliminate their emergency allotments in March because funding was cut in the 2023 omnibus spending package enacted in December.
States facing imminent reductions in food benefits include California and Texas, which have the most SNAP beneficiaries with 5.1 million and 3.6 million recipients, respectively. Meanwhile, New Mexico is home to the highest number of SNAP beneficiaries per capita, with more than 3 in 10 households currently receiving augmented food benefits.
As Insiderreported Friday, state officials are now “scrambling to get the word out to residents that their benefits are being dramatically reduced.”
Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director for SNAP at FRAC, told the outlet that “the last thing you want is grandma Sue showing up to the grocery store all of a sudden like, ‘Where’s my money? This is what I had budgeted.”
“That’s the hunger cliff that we’re facing—that people had this budget, things haven’t gotten better, and now you’re going to a grocery store where things are more expensive,” said Plata-Nino.
“You’re going to see, as the months go along, more families being hungry, more people visiting food banks, and just seeing the terrible effects that this had on all of these people.”
While the U.S. economy is on stronger footing than it was in March 2020, households are now grappling with higher prices—especially for essentials like milk and eggs—due to unchecked corporate profiteering.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, groceries cost about 10% more at the end of last year than they did 12 months earlier. The price of a gallon of whole milk climbed from $3.74 in December 2021 to $4.21 in December 2022, for instance, while the price of a dozen large Grade A eggs increased from $1.79 to $4.25 over the same time period.
Given the context in which looming SNAP cuts are set to unfold, “you’re going to see, as the months go along, more families being hungry, more people visiting food banks, and just seeing the terrible effects that this had on all of these people,” Plata-Nino predicted.
Millions of households nationwide continue to struggle with food insecurity. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 41.2 million people were enrolled in SNAP in fiscal year 2022, a 15% increase over fiscal year 2019, when roughly 35.7 million received food benefits.
“It may seem like an oddity that SNAP enrollment has increased given that the nation’s unemployment rate is at its lowest since 1969, but many workers still can’t find full-time work or line up enough hours to pay the bills,” CBS News noted, citing Vollinger. “Most working-age people who receive food stamps are employed, research has found.”
Vollinger told the outlet that people are often unaware that “so many SNAP households are employed, but often employed at low-wage levels—they aren’t in jobs that are family-sustaining so they still qualify for SNAP.”
As Insider reported: “Some states are stepping in to try and fill the gap left by the end of beefed-up SNAP benefits: New Jersey increased the minimum benefit that residents can receive, and Massachusetts is moving to try and keep payments higher for three months, albeit at 40% of what recipients get now.”
In other states that are simply sharing advice about how to cope with the pending cuts, such as stocking up on nonperishable items while food benefits remain higher, people are expressing anger.
“We are reducing your food stamps and we know you will have a hard time surviving so here are some tips,” one SNAP beneficiary in Colorado tweeted sardonically. “Don’t say we didn’t ever do nothing for you.”
In less than three weeks, bolstered SNAP benefits “will go the way of enhanced unemployment benefits, free school lunches, and the child tax credit,” Insider noted. “All provided a safety net and helped keep hunger at bay for many, but there is little legislative appetite to renew them.”
Other pandemic-era welfare state expansions—including increased Medicaid coverage and the free provision of Covid-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments—are set to end abruptly on May 11. That’s when the federal public health emergency, which the Biden administration has refused to extend further, is slated to expire.
COP27 and food price inflation are part of the same story
“When the public health emergency ends, many individuals and families will experience the cumulative impact of losing access to both Medicaid and SNAP,” advocates warned.
Pigs on a farm in Cambodia. Over the last 60 years, meat production has exploded in high-income countries and is projected to do the same in low-income countries in coming decades. | Universal Images Group/BSIP via Getty Images
A new report shows a drastic decline in wildlife. But farmed animals could have it even worse.
If you could choose to be alive at any point in human history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better moment than right now. We’re living longer, richer lives with better access to clean water, education, electricity, and basic human rights than ever before.
We can celebrate human progress without becoming complacent — after all, there’s never any shortage of bad news to report, and gaping disparities between rich and poor countries will remain far into the future. But McCartney and Lennon were onto something when they sang about things getting better all the time, even if they were talking about love, not life expectancy.
But for just about every animal species besides Homo sapiens, today is probably the worst period in time to be alive. According to a new World Wildlife Fund report, wild species populations have shrunk on average by 69 percent since the 1970s. And it’s due in large part to the demands of food production: Commercial fishing in the sea, and deforestation on land to make room for cattle grazing and the production of palm oil and animal feed crops.
As the report suggests, a not-insignificant amount of human improvement has come at the direct expense of these animals, with rapid human population growth — and all those people leading longer, richer lives — creating a surge in demand for cheap meat over the last 60 years. And producing all that cheap meat uses up a lot of land once occupied by wildlife.
The irony is that while populations of wild animals are clearly declining, numbers of domesticated animals — chickens, pigs, cows, and farmed fish — have been booming to meet the demands of a rising human population. Yet many of those farmed animals live lives of such intense, concentrated suffering in our industrialized agriculture system that they arguably have it even worse than their disappearing wild cousins.
Human prosperity and animal suffering exist in a kind of twisted symbiosis: Economic growth leads to more food production and consumption, which in turn results in faster population growth and longer life expectancy, which then requires more intensive, factory-farmed meat to satiate growing populations.
The cycle has been miraculous for humans. For all the problems of our global food system — including a recent rise in world hunger due to the Covid-19 pandemic and price hikes for grain caused by the war in Ukraine — far fewer people are undernourished today than they were in the 1970s, and the specter of famine has largely diminished. But the cycle has been disastrous for the environment and animals, as hundreds of billions of them are now raised on factory farms each year, accounting for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Growing prosperity and human population have also meant that more and more animals are being used in testing for drug development and consumer products, and that deforestation of massive areas of wildlife habitat is increasing — primarily for beef and livestock feed.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. An exception to this rule — that some of human flourishing has come at the cost of animal welfare — is pets; US euthanasia rates at pet shelters have plummeted since the 1970s. Despite a general decline in wildlife populations, many wild species’ populations are stable or increasing. And perhaps more consequentially, we’re at the start of what might be a moral revolution in our relationship to other animals. Countries are passing laws to ban the worst factory farming practices; leading philosophers are calling for an expansion of who we include in our moral circle; and scientists are building technologies that could one day eliminate the use of animals for food, medical research, and textiles.
Though currently low levels of meat consumption across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are projected to skyrocket in the coming decades, they’ll likely still be much lower than consumption in the West. But meat eating seems to have more or less peaked, or will at least grow very slowly, in richer parts of the world like the US and Europe.
Some countries, like Germany and Sweden, are actually starting to eat less of it overall, thanks in part to heightened campaigning over the environmental toll of meat production. The European Commission projects a 4 percent decline in per capita meat consumption within the bloc by 2031.
However, declining consumption is relative. Recent figures show Sweden’s per capita meat consumption is almost five times that of Pakistan’s, while the average German eats about as much meat in a month as the average Nigerian does in a year.
But just as some countries have figured out how to decouple greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth — improving quality of life while lowering the national carbon footprint — someday we might do the same for animal welfare.
We’ve made 11 charts that lay out the grim case for how human progress has too often come at the expense of animal welfare, while indicating some hope for a future where both humans and domesticated animals can flourish together.
In 1961, there were 2.5 land animals farmed for each human; in 2020 there were 9.5, a 280 percent jump. There’s now 74 billion of them churning through our farms and food systems each year.
But meat from all those animals is not consumed equally around the world: The average American consumes around 273 pounds of meat per year while the average Ethiopian purchases just 12 pounds.
It’s not just sheer numbers, however. As demand for meat has risen, conditions for animals have worsened. To raise those tens of billions of chickens, pigs, and cows, farmers and meat companies have prized efficiency over animal welfare and environmental conservation. The resulting factory farming model, first built in the United States and Europe in the post-World War II era, has since spread across the globe.
By one estimate, almost three-quarters of farmed land animals in the world are reared in factory farms, in which they’re crammed tightly into industrial warehouses and given little to no fresh air, sunlight, or access to the outdoors. And nearly all of the land animals raised for food are chickens — around 95 percent of them.
The rising demand for meat, especially beef, doesn’t just mean more animals suffering on farms. It has also destroyed wildlife habitats in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics.
Agriculture — clearing trees for farmland — is the overwhelming cause of deforestation. In 1700, just 9 percent of the world’s forests and wild grasslands had been cleared for agriculture. Today, it’s 46 percent, primarily forlivestock grazing, growing crops like soy to feed pigs and chickens, or for the production of palm and other oils.
Meat production doubly affects climate change, too. Not only do the animals we farm emit greenhouse gases, all that related deforestation releases carbon stored in trees, contributing to climate change and accounting for up to 10 percent of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions.
The world produces around 200 million tons of seafood each year, but we don’t know how many animals that represents, as fish are measured by weight, not individual animals. But one group — appropriately called Fish Count — estimates that anywhere between 1 trillion to 3 trillion fish and crustaceans, like shrimp and crabs, are eaten each year (though this figure excludes wild-caught crustaceans, which the group hasn’t yet calculated).
The farming of land animals is a mere rounding error when compared to seafood production.
To put that into perspective, there are far more fish and crustaceans raised and caught for food each year — 1 trillion on the lower end — than there are humans who’ve ever existed, which is estimated at 117 billion people.
Seafood production is unusual in that it relies on both catching fish in the wild, and farming them on land or in offshore pens. For most of human history, wild-catch was the dominant method. The fish we caught lived normal fish lives and only experienced pain for the minutes or hours it took to catch and slaughter them. Then, in the 1980s, fish farming took off over fears of declining wild fish populations.
Now, more than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms. They are essentially underwater factory farms, repeating many of the same problems found in farms on land: overcrowding, disease, and injuries.
Just as agriculture has transformed natural landscapes through deforestation, commercial fishing and fish farming have transformed oceans through pollution and overcatching. Discarded fishing gear accounts for around 10 percent of plastic found in the ocean, offshore fish farms pollute oceans, and the fishing industry is a leading threat to coral reefs, according to the US National Ocean Service.
If the demand for meat and seafood keeps rising, the toll on both the environment and animal welfare, including that of wildlife, will be immeasurable. Butthere’s some early evidence that at least some countries may have hit their peak of meat consumption.
Over the last decade, Germany’s per-capita meat consumption fell 12.3 percent. Experts attribute much of the change to the country’s environmentalists, especially the younger set, who’ve raised a big stink about meat’s contribution to climate change. Other factors may have contributed to the drop too, such as increased awareness of animal cruelty and labor issues in the meat industry.
Germany isn’t alone — Sweden’s meat consumption has been on the decline since 2016.
Sweden’s per-capita meat consumption fell 9.2 percent from 2016 to 2021 (with a slight uptick from 2020 to 2021).
Anna Harenius of Djurens Rätt, a Swedish animal protection group, told me environmental awareness also played a role in the country’s shift to plant-based eating (after all, Sweden is home to perhaps the most notable vegan environmentalist, Greta Thunberg).
Harenius also says Swedes are unusually fond of boycotts. They even boycotted the company that put Sweden on the plant-based map, Oatly, for taking investment from Blackstone, a private equity firm that’s linked to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and whose CEO has been a donor and adviser to Donald Trump.
The two countries demonstrate that change is possible even without forceful government policy, which goes against the idea, often floated among some environmentalists, that individual choices don’t matter all that much. Germans and Swedes just kept hearing the arguments for reducing meat consumption and seemed to take it to heart. (There’s no doubt that in order to move the needle on meat and dairy production’s environmental impact, governments will need to take stronger action at some point, as they have on energy production and transportation.)
Humanity has become accustomed to eating a lot of meat, and cheap meat at that. Campaigns to persuade people to eat less of it might work in some countries, but for most consumers, rich or poor, it’s a hard sell. Enter alternative protein products that aim to provide the taste and nutrition of meat and dairy without killing animals.
Alternatives to animal meat have been around for centuries, but only in recent years have they become more like meat than plants. Now, investors — and a growing ecosystem of scientists and advocates — are eager to make them taste much better and come down in cost.
Until 2016, a few companies dominated the plant-based meat market. Then, burgers from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods changed the game. Suddenly, consumer interest in plant-based meat spiked, and investors followed. In 2013, meat and dairy alternative startups received just $23 million in funding. In 2021, it was $5 billion.
Much of that went to plant-based startups, but companies that are racing to commercialize cell-cultured or “cultivated” meat — meat grown from animal cells — have gotten in on the frenzy. So have companies using different methods of fermentation.
Some governments, including the US, are funding alternative protein research, while others are even investing in plant protein companies. But it’s going to take awhile to see if all that investment pays off and actually changes how we eat; plant-based meat is still estimated to comprise less than 1 percent of total meat produced in the US.
For years, sales of plant-based meat grew at a rapid clip. But in 2021, that growth stalled. That’s partly because the growth in 2020 was unusual — the pandemic, and all the panic-buying it induced, sent all grocery sales to the moon, plant-based meat included.
But now, repeat purchase rates are lower than companies anticipated. Maple Leaf Foods, a big plant-based meat (and animal meat) producer in Canada, walked back some of its ambitious plans to scale up plant-based meat production after lagging sales, and Bloomberg has reported disappointing trials of veggie burgers at fast food chains.
But the global outlook for plant-based meat alternatives appears rosier than North America’s.
A lot of the noise about the plant-based meat market comes out of the US, where some of its biggest companies are headquartered. But Asia and Europe are also major producers and consumers of meat alternatives.
According to an analysis from the Good Food Institute, using data from market research firm Euromonitor, grocery sales of plant-based meat are estimated to have doubled around the world from 2017 to 2021.
The growth is expected to steadily continue. Bloomberg Intelligence is forecasting global plant-based food sales to more than triple from 2022 to 2030.
The meat and milk alternatives industry hasn’t made a dent in displacing conventional animal agriculture, but it’s still quite young. Advocates for a more humane food system aren’t putting all their eggs in that basket, though, and have been steadily working toward regulations that make factory farming a little less awful.
The US egg market looks a lot different today than it did at the start of 2015. Back then, only about 6 percent of hens raised for eggs were cage-free. The rest suffered miserably in what the industry calls battery cages, where each hen is given less space than a sheet of paper. They’re forced to live that way for 1 or 2 years until their productivity wanes and they’re turned into soup stock, animal feed, or pet food.
But in 2015, a California law that bans cages for hens went into effect. Big food companies, like Panera Bread and Starbucks, started sourcing more and more cage-free eggs following pressure from activists. Then more states banned cages and more companies moved on the issue, creating a virtuous cycle. Now 35 percent of hens in the US are cage-free, showing that progress can be made on the welfare side of things, and that it can happen quickly.
Still, it will be important to keep an eye on a pending case in the Supreme Court about another California animal welfare law that bans the use of crates for female breeding pigs — if it’s struck down, it could have lasting negative effects on efforts to improve farm animal welfare in the US.
A word of caution: Cage-free, while superior to conventional farming practices for the chickens’ welfare, does not equate to cruelty-free. Most cage-free hens never have access to the outdoors. Many still die prematurely from disease. They live in their own waste in cramped barns. But it’s progress nonetheless, and that progress has moved even faster across the Atlantic.
Some of Europe’s biggest countries have a majority of cage-free hens, like Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The rest of the continent is catching up; in 2017, 47 percent of hens were out of cages, and by 2021, it had risen to 55 percent. That equates to millions fewer hens in cages over the last few years.
The European Commission — the executive branch of the European Union — announced in June [2021] a ban on cages for a number of animals, including egg-laying hens, female breeding pigs, calves raised for veal, rabbits, ducks, and geese, by 2027. The plan would cover hundreds of millions of farmed animals raised in 27 countries. It puts Europe on track to implement the world’s most progressive animal welfare reforms within the decade. If ultimately enacted, it could turn out to be a pivot point in the decades-long fight to ease animal suffering.
There’s no doubt that the spread of factory farming across the globe, and the rise in meat consumption in lower-income countries, erodes the effects of many changes afoot in Europe and the US, as developing nations try to catch up with Western lifestyles.
But there is also strong public support for farm animal welfare across low, middle, and high-income countries, and there are budding animal advocacy movements and plant-based food startups sprouting up across the Global South, all trying to head off what could be a looming tsunami of industrialized meat production on the horizon.
Update, October 13, 12:30 pm: This story was originally published on September 12, and has been updated to reflect new data about the state of wild animal populations.
An open letter signed by over 200 humanitarian groups calls on world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly to urgently take action on world hunger, citing that one person dies of hunger every four seconds. We speak with Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, one of the letter’s signatories, who just returned from Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as next month. Climate change, COVID and conflicts such as the war in Ukraine are largely to blame for rising hunger, she says, and “those who are the least responsible are suffering its worst impacts.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: One person is dying of hunger every four seconds. That’s the warning from a coalition of humanitarian groups, who say global hunger is spiraling out of control. Oxfam, Save the Children and other groups say 345 million people are now experiencing acute hunger — double the number from 2019. Humanitarian groups from 75 countries sent an open letter to world leaders and high-level diplomats gathering this week for the United Nations General Assembly here in New York Ciy. This is the first U.N. General Assembly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a key meeting Tuesday focused on how the war is contributing to skyrocketing levels of hunger. This is the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
SECRETARY OF STATEANTONYBLINKEN: At the outset of 2022, conflicts, COVID-19, the effects of the climate crisis had already driven more than 190 million people into acute food insecurity. According to the World Food Programme, President Putin’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine may add 70 million people on top of that — an already staggering number becoming even more staggering.
AMYGOODMAN: This comes as the United Nations is warning of a looming famine in Somalia, where a searing drought fueled by the climate crisis has withered crops, killed livestock and left nearly 8 million people, or half of Somalia’s population, in need of humanitarian assistance. The U.N. says millions more are at risk of hunger and famine across East Africa, including Kenya and Ethiopia.
For more on the world hunger emergency, we’re joined in New York by Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America. She recently returned from a trip to Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as October. Oxfam is one of the signatories to an open letter submitted by over 200 NGOs to world leaders this week, calling on them to take immediate action.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Abby Maxman. Can you start off by laying out the scope of the problem and what you’re calling for?
ABBYMAXMAN: Thanks so much, Amy. Good to be with you.
Having just returned from Somaliland last week, I’m able to connect what we’re seeing in the lived, real lives of people and how they’re affected, and connect them with those global numbers you already outlined. Three hundred and forty-five million people are facing extreme hunger as a result of that confluence of climate, COVID and conflict — and that number, in and of itself, 345 million people, more than the entire population of the United States, and this in the 21st century.
Now, we know that we have been calling the alarm for several years. And we’ve had used our early-warning systems to trigger, to show — that have showed drought has continued to erode the lives and livelihoods of pastoralist and agropastoralist communities. Someone I saw in Somaliland, the stories were very similar. A woman named Safia, mother of eight, divorcée, who had stayed in her community as long as she could over the past several years, and ultimately went to a displaced persons camp near Burao called Durdur after she had lost 90% of her livestock. And hyenas were literally circling her family and her community as the livestock weakened. They had no choice but to move.
What is so egregious about this is the cause of this is climate change. The increasing frequency and ferocity of intense climatic shocks, droughts, floods and heat waves, that we’re observing from Pakistan to Puerto Rico and, of course, across East Africa, are evidenced in all of the news. But we know it’s people like Safia and the 74-year-old farmer who said this is the worst drought he has ever seen in his lifetime, they are down to one meal a day. And they need and deserve our help.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Abby Maxman, you mentioned conflict, as well. To what degree has the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected the food supply, especially to the Global South? And also, to what degree, from your sense, is it the corporations taking advantage of situations? We see the secretary-general mentioning oil companies or energy companies exploiting the current crises. Your sense of these two things — the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and general super profits sought by some international companies?
ABBYMAXMAN: Yeah, Juan, thanks for pointing those two things out. Yes, the war in Ukraine has exacerbated an already dire situation. The economic consequences of COVID and the climate crisis have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine. Prices have gone up exorbitantly. And people in Somaliland who I was talking to and seeing were spending more than 90% — 90% — of their income on food just to survive, and they were using coping strategies, down to one and two meals a day. That just is one anecdote of many about the impacts, direct and indirect, of the global crisis and conflict and its impact on those in East Africa and Somaliland.
Your point on fossil fuel profit and others, it can’t be understated. It is extraordinary that as humanity faces this existential crisis of climate, that there is still more incentive by fossil fuel companies to destroy our planet and people than to save lives and to save the planet. Now, we know that the oil and gas industry has enjoyed staggering profits as they have wrought havoc on the planet. They’ve been amassing $2.8 billion a day. That’s more than a trillion dollars a year over the last 50 years. And just let me contrast that against the fact that 18 days of fossil companies’ profit could cover the entire U.N. humanitarian appeal for 2022, which has been woefully underfunded.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you also mentioned that you were in Somaliland recently. Particularly, could you talk about the situation in Africa? Obviously, there are major conflicts still raging there, especially in Ethiopia. Your sense of the impact of those regional conflicts in terms of hunger and poverty in Africa?
ABBYMAXMAN: Yeah, Juan. Well, that confluence of those toxic three Cs — COVID, climate, conflict — are just supercharging the situation. And those who are least responsible are suffering its worst impacts. So, we need to make sure — we know that when humanitarian access is limited, that exacerbates people’s lives and livelihoods and the ability to get basics of their human rights — food, shelter, water, safety, protection. So, that is part of the cocktail, if you will, the toxic one, that people who — are experiencing, people like the countless pastoralists who are facing existential crisis to their lives, livelihoods, and that of their ancestors. They have rights and dignity that we need to protect and support in crisis. And the international community has a responsibility and a moral duty to act. And this week, in New York, around the U.N. General Assembly, we are calling on those in power, member states and policymakers, to take action now.
We need to do three big things. Save lives — and there’s a number of ways of doing that: make sure we resource the humanitarian appeals and get the resources to people who need them, support local organizations, women-led organizations. Second, we need to build resilience. We cannot repeat this pattern of pulling resources to respond to crises that we know are coming. And we need to invest in both now. It’s an investment in the future. It’s an investment in protection. It’s an investment in promoting lives and livelihoods and dignity. And third, we need to invest in that future, beyond the resilience. We need to double climate adaptation funds. We need to make sure that special drawing rights are modified so that countries are relieved from debt and debt burden. And we need to fund nutrition and other fundamental issues that need to be supported at this time.
AMYGOODMAN: Let me ask you about the growing inequality in the world and how this relates to the crisis of hunger around the world. According to a report just released by the investment bank Credit Suisse, the number of “ultra-high-net-worth” individuals, UHNW people, also increased exponentially last year to a record 218,200. Can you comment on this extraordinary rise in wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, while hundreds of millions are dying from hunger and hunger-related causes? And how must this be addressed?
ABBYMAXMAN: It must be addressed. And I appreciate there’s an acronym now, UHNW, though that’s sad, a sad fact that that needs to be called out. This is a failure in our economic system, a system that is broken and serving a privileged few. It’s not — it’s immoral, it’s wrong, and there’s an opportunity to fix it. It’s not happening by chance. It’s happening intentionally by those in power and political capture and those who are wreaking profits to benefit themselves.
There can be an opportunity to have a global wealth tax, to ensure that fossil fuel companies’ profits can be fairly taxed so that things like the U.N. humanitarian appeals, at a minimum, are funded. This is — nobody suffers. This is a race to the bottom versus a race to the top. And extreme inequality is harmful to all of society and all of humanity. It is very frustrating, it makes me very angry, to hear that, “Oh, there are no resources. That’s why we cannot save lives, build resilience and invest in the future.” That is not accurate. In the 21st century, there are enough resources to ensure the integrity and dignity of people’s lives and livelihoods and a more equal world. And there’s an opportunity to end extreme inequality by changing this failing economic system.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, Abby Maxman, we thank you so much for being with us, president and CEO of Oxfam America, recently returned from a trip to Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as October.
Next up, Adnan Syed has been freed after spending 23 years behind bars. His case gained international attention when it was the subject of the podcast Serial. We’ll speak with the first attorney to represent him. Stay with us.