Lunchbox/Soapbox: Peter Singer on why we need a beef tax

David Palmer Managing Director of Meat & Livestock Australia:

"Peter Singer’s suggestion that red meat should be taxed alongside items that are not good for people, such as tobacco and alcohol, is ridiculous and irresponsible. Red meat is an essential part of a healthy diet and the environmental impacts that Peter Singer is attributing to red meat are incorrect.

"Australian red meat production is amongst the most efficient of the major beef producing nations. A recent study by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) found that Australian production systems use considerably less energy to produce red meat than is often quoted in the media and by people such as Peter Singer."

"The UNSW study was a life cycle assessment, which is a form of cradle to gate analysis that attempts to quantify the important environmental impacts of all processes involved in a production system. Based on figures from the research, eating red meat three times a week results in between 164kg to 258kg of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions a year, vastly different to figures quoted that claim up to 1.5 tonnes.

"Australian farmers are also naturally environmentalists, caring for and managing large parts of our amazing country.

"Despite what Peter Singer would like to have us believe, a recent report by Cranfield University in the UK and commissioned by environmental group WWF, found that vegetarians can do more harm to the environment than meat eaters.

"The study found that switching from a diet of beef and lamb to meat substitutes, such as tofu, soy and lentils would result in more foreign land being cultivated and raise the risk of forests being destroyed to create farmland. Meat substitutes also tended to be highly processed and involved energy-intensive production.

"The red meat industry is the only production industry in Australia to have reduced greenhouse emissions since 1990. According to the Australian Greenhouse office we have reduced our emissions by 7.5%, compared to increases in other industries such as transport and electricity, up 26.9% and 54.1% respectively.

"Whilst we have reduced our emissions over this time, we know there are further improvements to be made. This is why MLA has co-invested with the Federal government and other partners in a $28 million programme with 18 research projects that are looking at how to reduce emissions from livestock.

"Importantly, the livestock industry in Australia produces food on land that often can’t be used to produce any other protein source. If we cut out red meat production on this land it couldn’t be used to grow plant based crops. Australian cattle and sheep are raised in a natural environment feeding on pastures with little or no use of fertilizers, it is a natural part of our environment.

"Calculations that are based on emissions alone, such as the ones Peter Singer has used, are simplistic and ignore the carbon cycle. If the carbon cycle is taken into consideration, as recently was done in a report by the Queensland Government (where the industry in that state is 47% of Australia’s cattle) the industry was found to be close to carbon neutral and potentially a carbon sink in the near future.

"Whilst I acknowledge the views of Peter Singer, he is fundamentally a vegetarian/ part time vegan who wants to force his views on free-thinking Australians.

"I wonder if this is not his main motivator for a tax on beef. Frankly I can’t see Australians responding well to a tax on their food."

Lisa Dempster:

Interesting that the MLA have come out fighting against vegetarianism, when actually Peter Singer's talk was not focussed on that topic at all.

In fact, at the beginning of his talk he addressed the fact that he's a vegetarian, stating his own background on the issue of vegetarianism and how the facts he would be presenting in his soapbox were not his own 'views' but facts that are considered by the world's leading experts to be true.

Perhaps because of his background in AR, Singer is not the best person to lead a discussion on a beef tax. But then, I'd hazard a guess that the Meat and Livestock Association of Australia are not exactly partisan commentators, either.

Geoff Russell:

David Palmer clearly thinks that The Wheeler Center readers are absolute idiots
who will take his words at face value without bothering to check.

My book "CSIRO Perfidy" answers many of his claims in a (hopefully) readable
form, but let's deal with a few things here.

First, when MLA said "red meat ... still an essential part of the diet [of people]" in
its Sam Neill ads, the ACCC told them to change it ... the claim is sheer nonsense ...
listen very carfully and you will see that they now say "...is a central part ...". Even
this is rubbish. Beef, for example provides 1.4% of global calories (FAO Food Balance
Sheets). Beef's main role on the planet is to cement the deforestation of our last
tropical forests and to provide bowel cancer surgeons with an abundant income.

Second, the 2007 World Cancer Research Fund was absolutely clear, its 150+
scientific authors said that red meat causes bowel cancer, no ifs, no buts, no
caveats. Based on this causal attribution and the consumption of red meat and
the incidence of bowel cancer in Australia, Professor Graham Giles of Cancer
Council of Victoria has run the numbers. Eating more than 1 red meat meal per week
is associated with about 6000 new cases of bowel cancer each year in Australia. This
isn't a guess but a calculation based on Victorian data and the WCRF judgement
that the association is causal. Remember when cigarette makers agreed that smokers get more lung cancer but the association wasn't causal? Deja vu. Giles, by the way talks
at forums funded by MLA and won't admit the association is causal, but he
was happy to send me the numbers. Ask yourself why ... he knows who I am
and what I'd do with the numbers.

Third, Palmer's repetition of the Australian's misrepresentation of a recent
WWF report is again an indication of how stupid he thinks you readers
are, there has been plenty of time for people to find out that this story
was rubbish from go to whoa, the full story is available here:

http://newmatilda.com/2010/02/22/tofugate

Many Australian farmers are environmentalists, but such vague waffle
misleads. Between 1990 and 2004, Australia's farmers deforested about
400,000 hectares per annum, with the cattle industry being
responsible for about 90% of this:

http://www.energyrating.gov.au/library/pubs/2003-endusereport-volume1.pdf

When land clearing laws clamped down on this, they objected strenuously, to
the point of a rather lengthy high profile hunger strike ... but they also continued to use the same bulldozers to knock down trees in Qld ... they just renamed it "Fodder harvesting".

I could go on ... but if you want more, can I suggest you visit http://perfidy.com.au
and order my book to read the whole sorry saga. Sorry for the plug, but you try
marketting a book in Australia that slams red meat :), even if I do have recommendations
from 2 professors and Australia's best known nutritionist (Dr Rosemary Stanton) on
the cover.

Let me leave you with a little exercise. Find the FAO Food Balance Sheets (google)
and checkout Nigeria and Burkina Faso ... both have almost identical
caloric intakes (about 2660 per day) and both are desperately poor countries. Now
find the WHO Nutritional Landscape Information Data and look at the rate of
stunting in children under 5. Burkina Faso gets 3 times the calories from
animal products that Nigeria does, but has a (slightly) higher rate of stunting and
a much higher rate of underweight children. And if you are seriously interested in
how livestock is a cause of so much third world hunger, then check out my
recent blog post on Barry Brook's bravenewclimate.com

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/02/04/boverty-blues-p2/