A new animated video presented by GRAIN and Alianza Biodiversidad offers an answer to this question. The video proposes solutions that can help get us out of the dead-end street in which the agrifood corporations are trying to barricade us.
In recent years, GRAIN’s research on the climate impacts of industrial food production has focused more particularly on the contribution of factory farming and its byproducts to global warming.
The data come as a shock: taken together, the world’s five largest meat and dairy corporations are responsible for a greater volume of greenhouse gas emissions than oil companies like Exxon, Shell, or BP.
The clear conclusion is that we must decrease our consumption of factory-farmed meat. Clearly, this is not a fight against meat eating as such (although the major meat-eating countries can make a big contribution to climate cooling and health by cutting their consumption); rather, it is a fight against the corporate systems that industrially produce and process meat. For thousands of years, small farmers around the world have raised, sold, and used animals for food and many other purposes. This is the path that will allow us, within the framework of our cultural diversity, to continue having meat as part of our diet.
But we must also take up the challenge of making sure that the gravity of the problem is given political recognition at the national, regional, and international levels and that our societies start taking action to rein in large corporate power.
Be part of the solution! Please share this video through your community and social networks. Use it as part of debates and workshops. Help it reach as many people as possible!
Watch the full video in Youtube.
Download a high-resolution copy from Vimeo .
For more information, see the following reports:
- Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet, https://www.grain.org/en/article/5976-emissions-impossible-how-big-meat-and-dairy-are-heating-up-the-planet
- Big meat and dairy’s supersized climate footprint, https://www.grain.org/en/article/5825-big-meat-and-dairy-s-supersized-climate-footprint