THEY ARE taking away your car, gas boiler and foreign holidays. Now they want to take away your meat and dairy too.
A government-commissioned report has said that our agricultural and food system will need a ‘complete transformation’ in order for us to reach Net Zero by 2050, and calls for the end of ‘ruminant agriculture’ in the UK. This means no more cattle, sheep or dairy products.
UK FIRES, which wrote the report, is a government-funded research organisation set up a few years ago to look into how Net Zero could be achieved in practice. Previous reports have revealed that we would have to forgo air travel, imports and the use of concrete, among other things.
This latest report poses serious questions which they fail to address. For a start, how could it be enforced? The phase-out of all livestock and dairy would need to be rapid, so would farmers be forced out? Or taxed out? Would farms be bought up by the state, as they are in the Netherlands? Or will the food simply be rationed and eventually banned from sale?
There is also the question of imported food. This too would have to be banned for the same reasons, as it invariably has a high carbon footprint. There would be no sense in shutting down UK farming only to replace it with imported food.
Pastoral farming is hugely important within the rural economy, especially in those regions where it predominates. In England alone, it accounts for 119,000 farm workers; but farms also do much to support the wider local economy. Farmers and their staff spend their money in local villages and towns, while supplier businesses are also dependent on those farms.
Tourism as well is attracted to these areas where there is a thriving local economy.
On a wider scale, meat and dairy products make up an important industrial sector in their own right. Agri-food as a whole adds £146billion to the UK economy, according to DEFRA, much of this coming from the products UK FIRES wants to eliminate.
Without meat and all the food we import, what will keep us from starving? Yes, vegetarians and vegans manage at the moment, but much of what they eat comes from abroad. Much of our pastoral farmland is unsuitable for crops – our ancestors learnt this a long time ago. You cannot simply switch from cattle to cereals, for instance.
UK FIRES mention ‘plant-based proteins, such as nuts and legumes’, which are hardly likely to keep 70million going in the middle of winter. But mainly, it appears, we will have to rely on ‘fermentation-based proteins’ and ‘cultivated meat’ – in short, highly processed industrial test-tube sludge.
But it’s not just meat. All of our agricultural industry will have to radically change if emissions are to be reduced to zero. Arable farming creates emissions of greenhouse gases, especially via the use of fertilisers and machinery. Far from increasing crop production to replace meat, Net Zero will inevitably do the opposite.
UK FIRES are absolutely clear about this. Agriculture accounts for a fifth of UK emissions, and although some of these could be saved through electrification, most cannot. If we want Net Zero, much of our farming sector will have to close.
As for the countryside we know and love, it will turn into an unsightly mess of solar farms, forestry plantations, industrial estates and overgrown rewilding schemes.
The complete transformation of our agricultural and food system will ruin the countryside, lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, destroy swathes of the rural economy and force us all to give up the nourishing foods we enjoy in favour of highly processed sludge.
Nobody voted for this, so why is it being imposed on us?
