The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Viva!life 86

Meat and dairy industries are gobbling up the globe like there’s no tomorrow – and left to them, there won’t be!

Featured in Viva!Life 86/Winter 2023

You must have seen them: reports that vegan food companies are collapsing, mock meats are bad for the environment and, blimey O’Reilly, what appalling things they contain! Veganism has had its 24 hours of fame and is now about to crash and burn.

Don’t believe it. Mock meat manufacturers have flooded the market with products and, like the Gadarene swine, some have galloped downhill and into the sea of oblivion – often because of inexperience, poor marketing, under-capitalisation and, yes, oversupply. But vegans are not deserting a sinking ship and veganism continues to expand, according to The Vegan Society.

Most of these negative reports emanate from the PR agencies of global meat and dairy, which have gone into overdrive attacking veganism while complicit media soak up their briefings like they’re the holy grail.

These industries hold the world in a chokehold, greenwashing the gullible and delaying essential change. Scientific research shows they are destroying human health and the global environment, but they bat such research away with contempt, deny and ridicule it or ‘disprove’ it with phoney scientific counter claims – exactly as the fossil fuel industries do and tobacco did before them.

As with all power blocks, there is no point at which it says: “OK, we’re now big enough,” for power is a drug, an addiction, and they continue to grow and gobble up all before them like a gigantic hungry caterpillar. They do deals with their main competitors (so there is no competition) and swallow little companies whole and then they start to look sideways – rather than buying fodder, why not control the seeds themselves and create a monopoly? But then, by incorporating weed killers into the seeds, you control the whole growth system and even farmers themselves.

In his latest book, Regenesis, journalist George Monbiot reveals some of the extraordinary power blocks that control agriculture and particularly animal agriculture. Five companies – Cargill, Archer Daniels, Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus – control 90 per cent of the global grain trade. Chem China, Corteva, Bayer and BASF control 66 per cent of the agrochemicals market. Deere, CNH and Kubota sell almost half of all farm machinery, while four firms run 75 per cent of all abattoirs and four control 70 per cent of pork slaughter.

These, then, are the principal players, who control not just the action but also the stage upon which it is performed. Over 80 per cent of global agricultural land is used for animals, either for grazing or growing fodder crops (more profitable than plants for humans), and much of it is owned by the Big Boys – one per cent of ‘farmers’ own something like 70 per cent of all land globally.

The outcome in terms of feeding the world’s population is inefficiency on an intergalactic level. Yes, farmed animals do demand 83 per cent of the land and consume 43 per cent of all crops and yet the meat, fish, eggs and dairy they provide supplies just 18 per cent of the world’s calories. No wonder starvation has become an epidemic.

The power of these cartels is eye-watering but it’s only the start. We all know – because the science tells us so – that the championing of plant-based diets is essential to save the world (and that’s not hyperbole). So what do European governments do – including our own? They provide 1,200 times more public funding to meat and dairy than they do to their alternatives (800 times more in the US).

The money spent on lobbying governments by Big Meat in Europe is over 500 times more than the alternative, plant-based or bio-meat companies.

These figures come from a study from Stanford University in the US. Prof Eric Lambin, one of the lead researchers, was clear about what’s happening:

“The power of the animal farming sector and the political influence they have is gigantic.” He added that they use this power “to maintain the system unchanged and to obstruct competition created by technological innovations.”

You may wonder why all news outlets are suddenly printing similar stories about the decline of veganism and the unsuitability of plant-based alternatives. The answer is that a huge public relations exercise is being operated by Big Meat in the US to create an army of influencers and citizen activists. It includes a free online training course called the Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA) in which 21,000 graduates are participating. Its sole purpose is to defend meat, sow confusion and downplay livestock’s contribution to climate change.

One of these ‘trained’ advocates has blown the whistle and revealed that the whole thing is a highly-funded, disinformation exercise to help ‘educate’ consumers and influencers “about the role of beef in a healthy diet and how beef farmers and ranchers raise beef responsibly and sustainably”. At the heart of it are the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

And, of course, it’s not just beef and it’s not solely the US but a global attempt to prevent any reduction in meat and dairy consumption. It is the tobacco industry on steroids!

There is a massive command centre in Denver, Colorado, that monitors all media communications, including the entire range of social media, for anything that implies meat consumption is bad for health or the environment. When they find it, tame academics and journalists, influencers and bloggers leap into action to counter it. It can be anything from challenging the use of words such as meat or milk by plant-based companies but their primary aim is to propagate a series of myths, which in reality are lies.

The first of these ignores the fact that animal agriculture produces 20 per cent of all greenhouse gases. It claims that the impact from energy use so far outweighs agricultural emissions that we might as well not worry about what we eat.

Second comes methane and the claim that it is so short-lived in the atmosphere that it, too, is not worth worrying about. And anyway, a few changes in farmed animal diets will soon sort it out. In fact, the International Energy Agency puts methane’s contribution to global warming at a whopping 30 per cent.

The next myth specifically defends beef and it quotes a US Department of Agriculture report that beef contributes just 3.3 per cent of the nation’s greenhouse gases and is therefore “not a significant contributor to long-term global warming”. Let’s try and forget that this research was partly paid for by the beef industry but even then, it means that US beef produces as much global heating as Spain.

Next comes the myth that animals graze only on lands that are not fit for anything else – something our National Farmers Union repeats ad nauseam. We’ll just close our eyes to forests that have been razed all over the world to accommodate grazing animals.

And finally, no need to worry as technology will save us – providing that technology doesn’t produce food products that aren’t animal related.

We are fighting a war of survival – it’s as simple as that – and there are very few allies on Viva!’s side, certainly not our own Government. It is amazing that we have had the successes we have but I have a horrible feeling that they will eventually come after us!