Should meat join the ranks of taxable sins?
A movement blending animal-rights and environmental concerns is pushing for a “sin tax” on meat, not unlike levies designed to discourage tobacco use or fossil fuel consumption.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is calling on governments to tax poultry, pork, beef and even fish as a way to promote a healthier diet and mitigate the environmental costs of meat production.
Eliminating meat from the human diet would be a net savings to the health care system, said PETA spokeswoman Ashley Byrne, who argued that meat consumption — our main source of saturated fat — is associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
“A tax would place meat where it belongs, in a category with cigarettes and alcohol because they are bad for human health,” she said, adding that meat production is “catastrophic for the environment.”
B.C. ranchers say environmental arguments focus only on the negative aspects of cattle production using global figures that don’t apply here and ignore the major benefits to water quality, biodiversity and the sustainable use of interior grasslands provided by ranching.
While the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that livestock contribute 14.5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, in Canada the figure is only 2.4 per cent, said Kevin Boon, general manager of the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association.
“You want to be very careful using figures from elsewhere in the world, where they might be clearing rainforest to raise feed for beef,” said Boon. “That isn’t the case in B.C., so simply saying ‘Eat less beef ’ leads to missed opportunities to protect our environment.”
A recent study by UBC grad students notes that local grasslands have co-adapted with ruminants and that light grazing mimics natural systems and supports natural carbon sequestration.
In a case study of policy goals using beef as an example, the researchers found that the Vancouver Greenest City 2020 Action Plan’s focus on ecological footprint alone neglected opportunities to make sustainability gains by ignoring the benefits of “ecosystem services.”
Well-managed grassland also supports a diversity of plants and animals, and provides a huge range of services, such as flood mitigation and riparian protection, said rancher Dave Zehnder, a director of Investment Agriculture Foundation.
“If you take a native grassland with all its complex biodiversity and interactions and turn it into a carrot field, that’s not going to be productive and ecologically, it’s a disaster,” he said. “Plus, when you till grasslands for crops, it releases a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere.”
Nonetheless, a white paper by the investment coalition Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return has called meat taxes “highly probable,” noting that a consensus of harm usually leads to an assessment of the true costs of a product, “which in turn results in support for taxation.”
At least 25 countries already tax sugar and “meat will be next,” the authors say.
Led by U.K.-based Coller Capital, FAIRR has more than $1.1 trillion under management in global markets, including stakes in the world’s biggest food conglomerates. They have also recently pressured large producers to curtail use of antibiotics on farm animals.
The Vancouver Humane Society promotes vegetarian eating through a number of campaigns, including Meatless Monday, and generally advocates public education about nutrition and “factory farming” as a way to promote a more ethical diet.
“We think it would be productive for governments to shift subsidies away from the meat and livestock industries as a way to support healthy plant-based food production,” said spokesman Peter Fricker. “Moves like that and more education on the negative consequences of a meatbased diet would send a strong message.”
The society is specifically opposed to livestock production on “factory farms,” including beef, pork and poultry.
“I don’t think a meat tax should be ruled out for the future, but at this stage it would be more useful to provide people with information about the downsides of meat on the environment, public health and animal welfare,” he said.