Daniel Korir, a researcher at the University of Melbourne, has said that growing crops for plant-based diets are better than for human consumption.
A plant-based diet consists mostly or entirely of plant-based foods and encompasses a wide range of dietary patterns that contain low amounts of animal products and high amounts of plant products such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
At the Africa Protein Summit 2022 on Tuesday, while presenting on ‘Livestock Production and Climate Change, Korir argued that the use of land to grow crops to feed animals that would become food for human consumption was highly inefficient and destructive.
He explained that of every 100 calories of crops fed to farm animals, only 17 to 30 calories get passed to humans.
“Meat and dairy provide only 18 percent of overall calories and 37 percent of proteins for humans but use 83 percent of farmland,” he explained. “We also know that animals are inefficient ways of producing food.”
What needed to be done is to foster a more closed food system (smallholders system) as well as employ a holistic approach to livestock production, animal welfare, and human and environmental health, Korir argued.
He noted also that there is a need to address the climate change injustice and explore GreenHouse Gas (GHG) mitigation options in the food systems.
The 2022 Global Report on Food Crises mid-year update shows that at least one in five Africans goes to bed hungry and an estimated 140 million people in Africa face acute food insecurity.
Rapidly growing and currently at 1.4 billion based on the latest United Nations estimates, Africa’s population is estimated to reach 2.5 billion by 2050.
While human population growth is driving demand and urbanisation, natural land, on the contrary, is almost reaching its elastic limit for productivity purposes.
What will then happen in the future is that there will be a mismatch between the human population and the livestock, he said.
To feed the growing human population and mitigate the impact of climate change, Korir asserted that it was safer to encourage smallholder farming for the food revolution but that factory farming should not have a future in Africa.
“If we maximise our smallholders’ system, we can be food sufficient,” he said. “If you look at those systems in the United States and China, tears will run your eyes if we are really concerned about the animals.”
He pointed out that the biggest climate change and environmental impacts of factory farming are caused by the production of animal feeds.
“Africa will face the worst consequences of climate change,” if it embraces factory farming, he said. The impact of factory farms causes effects on public health, and the suffering of billions of animals, drives climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, and undermines food security.
Intensive factory farming is known to contribute to high GHG emissions, but emission reductions from food production have so far received less attention in GHG mitigation policies than those from energy, transport, and other industrial sectors; consequently, emissions from agriculture could become the dominant source of global emissions and the “next pandemic” by mid-century.
The African continent is suffering more from climate change and the smallholders’ farmers are facing a lot of change if not supported, he stressed.
“How are we helping the farmers to adapt to climate change and how are we adapting our smallholders’ system and our integral food system into surviving the impact of climate change,” Korir queried and submitted that the solution to this could be by feeding the animal with better feeds (grasses) than concentrates.
According to him, most of the deforestation done in Africa was not directly to feed livestock but to feed humans, as a result of the growth of the human population.
He said, “The governments have not done justice to this well enough. Most of the activities there are for human consumption. We are not really clearing lands to feed livestock.
“It is not necessarily the clearing of forest that is harmful to the climate; it is the moving of the carbon either on trees or in the soils that is harmful.”
He added that if trees are cut down and replaced with planting of grasses it would help to retain the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, heightening climate change.
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