Meat & Dairy Lobby Pressured UN Body to Censor Work on Livestock Farming Methane Emissions: Report

Former officials at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said they were censored and undermined by the body when reporting on the methane emissions caused by the animal agriculture industry, owing to pressure from the livestock lobby, reports the Guardian.

Ex-members of the FAO allege that they were “censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised” for a decade after reporting on the hugely detrimental effect of livestock farming on methane emissions. In 2006, the FAO published a report called Livestock’s Long Shadow, a landmark study highlighting the first calculations of the environmental cost of the meat and dairy sectors.

The report outlined that livestock farming was responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This estimate included 9% of all carbon emissions due to deforestation and feed crops, 37% of methane emissions, largely from cow burps, 65% of nitrous oxides from manure, and 64% of ammonia emissions (all anthropogenic).

The publication was damning, receiving praise from environmental quarters and swift backlash from the meat and dairy industry. Some of the people who worked on that report told the Guardian how this led to an internal clampdown by leaders at the FAO, which was long seen as an ally by the animal lobby.

Henning Steinfeld, head of the FAO’s livestock analysis unit, recalled hearing that “the FAO has fallen into the hands of vegan activists” and receiving personal threats like “the anti-livestock people are a pest that needs to be eradicated”.

An ex-member added that “lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship,” they explained. “It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism.”

livestock methane
Courtesy: Unsplash

Backlash from countries and industry

Between 2006 and 2019, both current and former FAO experts said management had made several attempts to suppress investigations linking cows to climate change. But the pressure wasn’t just internal – the FAO was facing the force of large meat producers like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Australia and the US, which complained to leadership, while there were also protests from “the private sector, the large-scale meat, feed and dairy producers”, according to Steinfeld.

Meanwhile, there were negative reactions from media outlets including the BBC, the Telegraph and CNN, who criticised an error made by the report in its calculations. The paper alleged that livestock’s impact on global warming was “an even larger contribution than the transportation sector worldwide”, which one of the authors called a “slight methodological error” only inserted on request from the FAO press office, which wanted to hype up the report.

One source told the Guardian they were reprimanded for prepping Meatless Monday leaflets for the cafeteria during an FAO food security summit with heads of state in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive told them. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”…

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Article URL : https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/un-fao-livestock-farming-meat-dairy-animal-lobby-methane-emissions-climate-change-the-guardian/