The global food system is reeling from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reverberating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and devastating droughts across Africa, India, and the Middle East. Looking to the future, a warming climate threatens to reduce crop yields worldwide, while unpredictable severe weather will introduce many opportunities for localized crop failures and supply chain disruptions. One of the best ways to strengthen the globalized food system is to reduce our reliance on its most inefficient and highest-emitting sector: animal agriculture.
Consider that, amid a critical shortage of grain, which threatens to destabilize entire economies in the Middle East and beyond, the global animal agriculture sector uses one-third of the world’s supply. Only a fraction of that is converted into edible protein. This contributes to global food insecurity by pushing prices for grains and other crops used as animal feed higher than they would be otherwise, making it harder for the world’s poorest people to afford staple foods and leaving more people hungry or malnourished. In addition, both directly and through its sizable contribution to tropical deforestation, animal agriculture accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and one-third of the world’s emissions from methane, a climate superpollutant 28 times more powerful at warming the planet, over a 100-year period, than carbon dioxide.
