Ensuring food security by growing less food, from Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:
Inside the UK’s “food security” report.
On November 29th, the British Parliament’s cross-party Environmental Audit Committee published a new report on “Environmental change and food security”.
The timing of the report is more than interesting, considering the UN’s COP28 summit published its own “Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action” (which the UK signed) just two days later. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
The report claims – amongst many other things – that we…
need to adapt our food and farming system to become more resilient to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.
This is actually an inversion of the usual argument. The standard line is that we should change our eating habits to prevent climate change (the report still claims this too), but now we are being told that we must change our eating habits or climate change will cause us to starve to death.
Just like the push to change climate into a public health crisis, inverting this argument is about creating a sense of threat, about scaring people. It’s always about scaring people.
But, you’ll be pleased to know, while the reason we need to change may have altered, what we actually have to do remains the same: Eat less meat. A lot less meat.
The report repeats, countless times, the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation that the UK “reduces its meat and dairy consumption by 20% by 2030, and by 35% by 2050”
In a blatant rhetorical trick, it tries to make this figure into some kind of compromise by pointing out that some of their witnesses (eg. noted lunatic George Monbiot) advocated eating zero meat or animal products of any kind.
The report is full of this kind of manipulative language.
