Cattlemen defend livestock's role in producing food

By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press

Western cattle groups are brushing aside a suggestion by India's environmental minister that consumers should fight global warming by pulling beef off the menu.

Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh said in a speech in mid-November that abstaining from beef would curtail emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas.

"The single most important cause of (carbon) emissions is eating beef," Ramesh said, according to the Agence France-Presse.

Bill Bullard, CEO of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, said the claim is "baseless."

With a majority Hindu population that shuns eating beef and believes the cow is sacred, India has one of the largest cattle herds in the world, with about 177 million head, Bullard said. The U.S. herd is about 95 million head.

"India must have an ulterior motive to be using that as a call for climate change reform," he said. "We just don't think there's any scientific basis for India to be making that claim."

Canadian Cattlemen's Association President Brad Wildeman said much of the rangeland in North America isn't suitable for grain production, so it's being used to create a high-value protein for the world.

"The choice is, do we want to create more protein or do we want to have people starving?" Wildeman said. "We can't have it both ways."

Ramesh's remark comes after the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted that meat production accounts for a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that agriculture as a whole emits only 5.8 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases, and that livestock is responsible for less than 3 percent of America's global-warming-related emissions.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association asserts that livestock production provides key sources of soil carbon sequestration, renewable energy and other greenhouse gas offsets.

The beef industry also uses by-products from human food, fiber and biofuel production that would otherwise be discarded in landfills and become a source of greenhouse gases, the NCBA argues.

Canada's Wildeman agrees. He said it's better to capture carbon with the native grassland and woodland that's conducive to livestock production than to plow it up and use more fossil fuel and fertilizer to produce food.

"It's out there a bit," Wildman said of the idea that livestock production largely contributes to climate change. "This is brought up by well-meaning people that don't understand very well."