FAO向肉食工业妥协(英文) - 罗伯特·古德兰

编者按：罗伯特·古德兰在纽约时报专栏上发表的最新文章，全局性地考察和总结了关于畜牧业与气候变化的关系的各方观点及其动向。作者通过分析指出，由于国际肉类组织(IMS)、国际乳制品联盟(IDF)、国际蛋类委员会(IEC)和国际家禽委员会(IPC)等机构正在以合伙人的方式进入到了粮农组织(FAO)的决策层，使FAO在最近制定的一项政策中显示，他们正在向肉食工业妥协。

FAO的这项政策倾向于“改进”畜牧业对资源的消耗，而不是减少肉类的生产和消费。

FAO的宗旨是提供一个“中立的平台”，这使之无法在科学上保持独立性。即使是在《牲畜的巨大阴影》这篇报告里，也是综合了各方的观点(有些论点甚至相互矛盾)。

文章指出，《牲畜的巨大阴影》的主要作者 Henning Steinfeld 甚至在2010年10月就撰文质疑减少肉类消费的政策。

FAO机构本身的这种特点，使之只能是一个协调各方观点的机构，无法与任何一方对立，特别是具有强大背景的畜牧业。

文中指出，FAO的某些合伙人甚至支持发展大规模工业化养殖，这一受到多方诟病的产业。

由于畜牧业对环境危害的相关研究和数据越来越多，特别是有关畜牧业碳排放的数据，使畜牧业的发展受到公众广泛的质疑。对此，2012年3月国际家畜研究所(ILRI)公布的一项政策说：“要加强研究以回应这些挑战”。

文章再次讨论了畜牧业的碳排放量问题，关于FAO计算的数据18%和作者本人计算的51%的差距。作者指出，《牲畜的巨大阴影》估计的牲畜和饲料的土地使用为占地球陆地的30%，而国际家畜研究所(ILRI)估计数据为45%。FAO在这篇报告中显然低估了这一数据。

因为文中给出了大量的原始资料链接(在这里，我们已经把部分链接指向了有中译文的地址)，所以我们将英文原文全部复制过来，有兴趣的读者可以进一步深入研究。

2012年7月11日

The past year has been the warmest ever in the United States, with record heat sweeping across the country last week, causing at least 52 human deaths and also harming livestock. In fact, livestock are not only harmed by human-caused global-warming greenhouse gas, but also cause about 18 percent of it, according to "Livestock's Long Shadow" a 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report by FAO livestock specialists (who normally promote livestock).

In contrast, environmental specialists employed by two other United Nations specialized agencies, the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, have developed a widely-cited assessment that at least 51 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas is attributable to livestock. I'm one of those specialists.

One might expect the FAO to work objectively to determine whether the true figure is closer to 18 percent or 51 percent. Instead, Frank Mitloehner, known for his claim that 18 percent is much too high a figure to use in the U.S., was announced last week as the chair of a new partnership between the meat industry and FAO.

FAO's new partners include the International Meat Secretariat and International Dairy Federation. Their stated objective is to "assess the environmental performance of the livestock sector" and "to improve that performance," starting with a three-year project to establish "methods and guidelines."

Yet within five years, greenhouse gas may increase to irreversibly catastrophic levels if nothing is done to change course, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency.

The new partnership assumes that meat production worldwide will "more than double" from 1999 to 2050. But the International Food Policy Research Institute has set out a scenario by which meat production will decline at least through 2030. Climate authorities like Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the seminal Stern Review on the economics of climate change, and Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair, have even recommended vegetarian diets to reverse climate change.

FAO's new activity isn't entirely a surprise, as its livestock specialists have elsewhere acted to reverse a common perception that a prescription for less livestock was built into their report "Livestock's Long Shadow" For example, its lead author and a co-author later wrote to prescribe more factory farming, not less, and no limit on meat.

Yet "Livestock's Long Shadow" may not be uniformly endorsed by the whole FAO, as it invited Jeff Anhang and me to present our analysis first at FAO headquarters in Rome, then in Berlin.

FAO's basic purpose is to "promote the common welfare" in a "neutral forum." However, FAO's new partnership includes only four wealthy countries, and no poor country. Yet the former director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which normally promotes livestock, expressed concern about the impacts of industrially-produced meat on the poor – saying that "factory-farmed" livestock eat grains "that might instead have fed people."

Factory farming was criticized even by a co-author of "Livestock's Long Shadow" Cornelius De Haan, when he was lead author of the World Bank's 2001 livestock strategy. That strategy pegged livestock's adverse impacts at a lower level than in the 2006 "Livestock's Long Shadow" — yet the World Bank strategy recommends that institutions should "avoid funding large-scale commercial, grain-fed feedlot systems and industrial milk, pork, and poultry production."

Conversely, the stated goal of Frank Mitloehner, chair of FAO's new partnership, is to promote intensified livestock production.

A new ILRI strategy concludes that "livestock is back on the global agenda," and that increased productivity must come from "intensified" systems. A videotape reveals a push for research to support ILRI's predetermined conclusions, as the new director general states: "How do we elevate the livestock game?…In the past we have not looked so much at the issue of food consumption in urban areas…A good bit of the negative criticism of livestock is its contribution to greenhouse gases and its very high environmental footprint – so we must develop stronger research responses to these challenges."

Evidence shows that ILRI may fear public acceptance of our widely cited assessment that livestock are responsible for at least 51 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas. ILRI was sufficiently concerned about acceptance of the 51 percent figure that it raised the issue with its annual meeting's participants before, during, and after its 2010 meeting – and found that acceptance of the 51 percent figure by the meeting's participants actually rose from about 1.5 percent before the meeting to about 7.5 percent after the meeting.

Yet "Livestock's Long Shadow" apparently undercounted by a large margin the amount of land used for livestock and feed production – estimating it at 30 percent of all land on earth, while ILRI has estimated it at 45 percent. Other gaps in "Livestock's Long Shadow" may have occurred because it was authored by livestock specialists – while international good practice in environmental assessment is to have projects with major environmental impacts (such as global livestock and feed production) be assessed by environmental assessment specialists.

The key difference between the 18 percent and 51 percent figures is that the latter accounts for how exponential growth in livestock production (now more than 60 billion land animals per year), accompanied by large scale deforestation and forest-burning, have caused a dramatic decline in the earth's photosynthetic capacity, along with large and accelerating increases in volatilization of soil carbon.

Agriculture is outdoors to a unique degree, exposing it to greater risk from emissions attributable to livestock than any other industry's risk from the same emissions. So food industry leaders have a compelling commercial incentive to reduce these emissions.

While the FAO and ILRI argue that millions of poor people have no alternative to raising livestock for their livelihoods, tens of millions of poor people's livestock have died in the past few years because of climate disasters. Replacing them would risk a similar fate for the new animals.

Conversely, replacing at least a quarter of today's livestock products with better alternatives would both reduce emissions and allow forest to regenerate on a vast amount of land, which could then absorb excess atmospheric carbon to reduce it to a safe level. This may be the only pragmatic way to reverse climate change in the next five years as needed. Sufficient renewable energy infrastructure is projected to take at least 20 years and $18 trillion to develop.

Substitutes for livestock products require no subsidies or offsets. Consumers can buy more of them tomorrow.

原文：FAO Yields to Meat Industry Pressure on Climate Change