Elite group’s plan for “planetary health diet” calls for transformation away from animal ag
Imagine a group of a few dozen elite scientists from the Global North getting together to develop a framework of earth system thresholds, and this framework – despite its conceptual form and varied confidence levels – is then used by financial institutions and governments to guide policies, regulations and investments for human use of the Earth’s resources.
The leader of this elite group then goes on to lead a second elite group of scientists, this time preparing a report calling for transformation of global food systems away from animal products to a predominantly plant-based diet – all in the name of “planetary health.”
This new plan includes a prescriptive “planetary health diet” which the elite scientists would like humans of the world to adopt.
One doesn’t need to imagine, since this is what happened.
The release of the updated EAT-Lancet report in mid-October calls for a “great food transformation” with an anticipated global reduction of 43 percent in the livestock sector by 2050, amounting to a loss of $650 billion in production.
More of the reduction would be for ruminant meat at 71 percent, than for non-ruminants with a 46 percent reduction or dairy with a 20 percent reduction.
The report imagines a 50 percent reduction in food loss as a key strategy, although how this is viable remains unclear.
But this is not all – this transformed food system would result in the largest reduction in agricultural land in more than 2,000 years, since any conversion of land for agricultural use would also be halted under its prescription for the global good.
The report also prescribes a 70 percent global reduction in pesticide application, completely halting prophylactic antimicrobial use and halving existing antimicrobial dosage rates from 50 to 25 milligrams per kilograms per animal.
The report claims there is “no safe solution” to the climate and biodiversity crises without this global food systems transformation.
Ruminant meat production worldwide would need to decline by 33 percent, while there would need to be a 63 percent increase in fruit, vegetable and nut production above 2020 production levels. Additionally, fish production would increase by 46 percent.
How it started
The concept of a defined framework of planetary boundaries – thresholds beyond which the risk to humanity could be catastrophic – was popularized by Swedish Scholar Dr. Johan Rockstrom and a group of about 30 fellow scientists back in 2009.
At the time, the authors suggested three of the nine boundaries had already been transgressed – climate change, biodiversity loss and shifts in the nitrogen cycle. By 2015, this concept was updated by a smaller group of scientists who reported the addition of another boundary breach – land use change.
This update noted the framework was a work in progress, but the framework was already under consideration by governmental bodies throughout the world, as well as global financial institutions, corporations, non-governmental organizations and philanthropists.
By 2023, yet another team of scientists determined six of the nine planetary boundaries had been transgressed.
Meanwhile, Rockstrom and Walter Willett of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health co-chaired a team of about 35 co-authors to issue the first EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems.
This report declared food production is the largest pressure caused by humans on Earth, and transformation of the global food system was needed, with major reductions in the consumption of red meat and other animal products, while boosting plant-based eating.
Willet’s role in the report is controversial because of his zealous support for a vegetarian diet and his reputation for bullying fellow scientists who may reach conclusions which do not support his position.
October’s release of the updated EAT-Lancet report saw its list of co-authors double, but it’s still a group of about 70 scientists who seek to have all of global humanity follow their guidance. The anti-animal agriculture interests pushing this agenda are well organized and have numerous networks and connections.
Pushing the movement is the EAT Advisory Board, which includes Rockstrom as its chairman; Lancet Editor-In-Chief Richard Horton; former People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Vice President Bruce Friedrich, who is also the founder and president of the Good Food Institute, an organization promoting alternatives to animal products and a variety of representatives from organizations as varied as the World Bank, Culinary Institute of America, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, United Nations, Royal Phillips and National Geographic Society.
The EAT-Lancet paper was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Wellcome Trust, IKEA Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
Criticism is discouraged
This “urgent need for a great food transformation” will need $200 to $500 billion per year “to support the transformation to healthy, sustainable and just food systems.”
The report outlines methods to achieve this great food transformation, including imposing meat taxes and providing subsidies to shift affordability to particular foods, combining advertising restrictions with mandatory warning labels on what it determines is unhealthy foods and combining regulatory measures with land-use zoning to halt further ag conversion.
The report goes into what it calls a “just” food system, but it doesn’t mention the preservation of heritage breeds nor the jeopardy the plan poses to the rich cultural heritage of communities around the globe.
There is no recognition of the fundamental connectedness between humans, animals and landscapes developed over thousands of years or the mutual bonds that bind them.
There is no recognition of the positive impact to health and well-being which comes from these interspecies relationships; the possible devasting consequences to the biological diversity of the world’s livestock populations should the scheme be adopted or its potentially devasting impacts on local livestock production, consumers, communities and, ultimately, food sovereignty.
Critics who would question the report’s models and methodology, oversimplification of complex systems, reliance on nutritional evidence which leans heavily on association rather than causation, potential impacts to public health or who probe the potential conflicts of interests of some of the report’s primary authors and funders are preemptively discredited.
The report includes a warning about bad actors, noting these are primarily corporate interests acting against the public interest. It notes this includes corporations sponsoring scientific studies aligning with their interests “and the dissemination of misinformation aimed at discrediting independent scientific evidence – such as in cases involving scientists sponsored by the meat industry.”
The publication of the EAT-Lancet report was accompanied by an editorial by Horton, who predicts, “criticism and a meat-industry led response” to the updated report, suggesting a network of “mis-influencers – like scientists, doctors and journalists – who amplify disinformation to create uncertainty around, and opposition to, the EAT-Lancet findings and recommendations.”
A similar “onslaught of attacks” led to the World Health Organization withdrawing its support for the 2019 report. Horton himself is one of the influencers pushing this agenda and using a scientific publication to do so.
But the scientific, social and political skepticism and arguments concerning the underlying claims and wisdom made in a proposal for global transformation of the systems used to feed humanity isn’t a byproduct of “Big Beef” exerting its undue influence.
It’s the logical consequence of human intelligence reluctant to allow for top-down schemes crafted by elitists which present biased information to impose a predetermined agenda.
In an obvious coordinated campaign, just a few weeks prior to the release of the new EAT-Lancet report, the Changing Markets Foundation released its own report alleging there was a meat-industry orchestrated backlash to the 2019 EAT-Lancet report and naming meat “mis-influencers.”
The Netherlands-based Changing Markets Foundation – founded by two former Greenpeace executives – is committed to the view “society needs transformational change” and seeks to reduce meat and dairy consumption, using tactics to discredit critics and calling agriculture “Big Meat.”
The foundation also has an arm in the U.S., but according to its most recent tax filing, its only activity is to provide $675,000 to the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization well known for its anti-livestock ideology.
Yet another report
On Oct. 13, yet another new report was released. This one was on Global Tipping Points and came from the United Kingdom (UK)-based University of Exeter, but it is the result of a conference convened by Rockstrom, creator of the planetary boundaries framework and the EAT-Lancet report.
Rockstrom retains oversight via his co-chair position atop the Swedish-based Earth Commission.
The Tipping Points report, funded in part by the Bezos Earth Fund, finds fault in countries which only include food-based dietary guidelines that do not explicitly reference environmental sustainability in their dietary guidelines.
It also bemoans “livestock products retain strong cultural value in many countries,” which could be a hindrance to changing to plant-based diets.
The report recommends a phase-in of policies “including public food procurement, mandates, taxes and subsidies in favor of plant-based food supply and demand.”
Ag is not the enemy
While the EAT-Lancet report is based on the view nature conservation depends on policies and actions which provide protection from human activities – especially agriculture – this is in sharp contrast to the perspective of a group of European landscape scientists published earlier this year.
A paper lead by Andrzej Bobiec of the University of Rzeszow in Poland – and joined by academic colleagues in the UK, Turkey, Hungary and Italy – notes traditional agriculture and sustainable family farming should be considered “biocultural refugia” for their role in the provision of multiple ecosystem services, “indispensable for diversity of practices, for food security and biodiversity, the very way of life in harmony with nature and tradition, often at a price of any major economic gain.”
These farms contribute not only to biological diversity, but also to public food security, cultural richness and the general quality of life, the authors note.
“Thus, instead of stigmatizing agriculture, patronizing farmers to exert on them green agendas, we should establish an effective ‘umbrella’ or buffer, protecting the autonomy of all remaining smallholder, (semi)subsistence family farms and provide any subsidiary assistance they need to keep going,” they write. “The authors also advocate for development of re-agrarianisation policies to provide conditions to all who would like to make a living out of smallholder farming.”
The popular belief restoring human-free “pristine nature” will save the planet implies the wilder ecosystems are more capable of ensuring life on Earth for future generations.
But the landscape scientists argue human cultures connected to the environment through subsistence traditional land use – rather than the planet’s own custody of nature – has proven to be efficient biodiversity vehicles. The “hands-off” approach can lead to an irreversible loss of ecological characteristics which have been sustained by hundreds of years of traditional use.
And, when scientists use biological indicators to assess the health of an ecosystem, often the indicator is a simplistic measure such as the conservation status of an indicator species which leads to biased diagnosis of an ecosystem’s state and processes and does not reflect the complex interactions involved in the dynamics of a landscape.
Bureaucratic procedures and technical jargon referring to the assessment of specific indicators “provide a strong advantage to experts and conservationists over local land users – the true stewards of landscape’s biocultural diversity.”
Although most decision-making protocols require some opportunity for public participation, it is generally viewed as conservation professionals “educating” local communities who are then expected to be persuaded to provide agreement.
Bobiec’s paper notes this “condescending sense of the mission of conservation” assumes agriculture to be among the major culprits of biodiversity loss.
“This would be justified if only applied to intensive, industrial farming, which however, developed at the expense of traditional-biodiversity-friendly-agriculture,” says Bobiec.
“Concentrating on ‘wild nature,’ we allowed sustainable family farming to be subjected to ruthless forces of global markets and policy agendas disempowering peasant farmers, leading to landscapes’ cultural severance and destroying socio-ecologically integrated village systems” the paper states.
“Conservation incentive programs fail due to the conservationists’ ignorance or disrespect for farmers’ values,” it adds. “Top-down policies which set aside protected areas are easier to implement than the development and sustenance of spatially, ecologically and socially embedded farming, which requires respect for its autonomy.”
“Autonomous, small family farms and their communities secure the diversity of local food systems and are thus important factors of food sovereignty and indispensable sources of high nutritional quality,” the paper continues.
The landscape scientists propose the present use of inefficient, “quasi-authoritarian, top-down model of exerting ‘green’ solutions” be replaced with a system involving active participation of land use practitioners.
A “fair and equitable involvement of small-scale land users is needed to bring in their intimate understanding of nature and human-nature relations into conservation planning,” Bobiec writes. “This should be accompanied by an intensive process of knowledge partnership and knowledge co-production where scientific knowledge and local, traditional knowledge can re-focus our ecological knowledge base of conservation, preferably in community-based conservation actions.”
Cat Urbigkit is a corresponding writer for the Wyoming Livestock Roundup. This article was originally published in Urbigkit’s Range Writing publication on Oct. 22.
