Founded in 1945, the United Nation’s (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is the world’s primary source for agricultural data. Governments from 194 nations, as well as the European Union, fund the global organisation, as well as routinely use its reports to inform their agricultural policies. But recently, its neutrality in assembling data on greenhouse gas emissions from livestock has come under scrutiny.
Changing Markets Foundation’s report “The New Merchants of Doubt: How Big Meat and Dairy Avoid Climate Action” revealed the FAO’s overwhelming bias for the livestock industry, prompting key recommendations for the organisation’s overhaul. This comes on top of concerns from academics and NGOs about the FAO’s recent studies, which put it at odds with the scientific consensus on the urgency to reduce livestock emissions and shift to more plant-based diets.
Ironically, the FAO was the first international institution to suggest that the world’s livestock production model needed to be changed. Back in 2006, the FAO’s ground-breaking study Livestock’s Long Shadow described livestock production as ‘one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global’, with an impact ‘so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency’. It estimated that the livestock industry’s contribution to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 18%, including 9% of all carbon emissions and 37% of methane emissions.
The report called for a robust and comprehensive programme that removed production subsidies and repriced land, water, and feed resources to reflect their scarcity levels more accurately. It also recommended the incorporation of livestock’s externalities under the ‘polluter pays’ principle.
Our investigation shows how these findings caused a storm of industry backlash – but in a series of delayed waves. The industry attacked a comparison that was created by the FAO communications department mistakenly comparing lifecycle livestock emissions to the tailpipe emissions of the transportation sector. Important players in the livestock industry and its scientists used this mistake to try and discredit the whole report, leading to negative press coverage and criticism. Several of the Long Shadow’s author team would later claim that their subsequent work had been censored, sabotaged and undermined by the FAO hierarchy, in an internal backlash.
This negative backlash from media, industry players and governments had a profound impact on the FAO’s work. In 2013, the ‘Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock’ report estimated that the livestock industry accounted for 14.5% of the world’s global heating, but its language shifted in urgency, describing the problem of livestock emissions as ‘important’ instead of ‘massive’. Furthermore, the reports’ recommendations for reform were modified from slashing subsidies and taxing externalities to merely encouraging the adoption of more efficient supply chain management and farming technologies – aligning more closely with the preferred solutions of big industry players and governments.
More recently, at COP28 in December 2023, the FAO’s third cornerstone paper ‘Pathways towards Lower Emissions’ report again reduced its estimate of livestock’s global warming impact to 12%. The base year for the estimate was 2015 but the paper’s findings seemed to contradict other FAO reports. It was suggested that the discrepancy between Pathways was due to a new methodology known as GLEAM 3 but little transparency was provided on the data sources and calculations.
The study was also significantly more positive in its assessment of the livestock industry, asserting it plays ‘a vital role’ in providing nutrition and community ‘resilience’. Instead of emphasizing the urgency of the problem, Pathways simply suggested that the emissions from livestock systems could have a ‘negative impact’ on the environment. This contradicts the emerging scientific consensus that, to meet the Paris climate goals, livestock herd numbers should peak by 2025 with a steady decline thereafter. Pathways predicted demand for animal products to increase by 20% by 2050, and for related emissions to increase by 32% (from 6.2 Gt to 9.1 Gt).
It also controversially claimed that a shift to plant-based diets would have a minimal impact on global greenhouse gas emissions (only 2-5% reductions), undermining it as a practical alternative. The report based this misleading statistic on a 2017 paper by Paul Behrens, an associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, but the paper was outdated. Several countries had drastically reduced their recommended meat intake since the paper was published, while the FAO also decided to conveniently ignore the assessment of the groundbreaking EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets. Behrens described the distortion of his research as ‘upsetting’ and Pathways as ‘a scientifically flawed report that is already being used to delay the very urgent action we need on reducing livestock numbers for both the planet’s health and our own.’
Another academic cited by the FAO in Pathways, Matthew Hayek, complained that the paper misused a report that he had co-written, by applying measurements of total agrifood emissions to livestock emissions alone. By doing so, the mitigation potential of livestock herd reductions was underestimated by a factor of between six and 40. As a result, Behrens and Hayek wrote a joint letter demanding the retraction of the Pathways report, garnering significant press coverage throughout Europe.
On the other hand, the study received praise from one group: the Animal Feed Industry Association. Constance Cullman, president of the industry lobby group, described it as ‘music to our ears’.
At almost the same time that Pathways was released, the FAO put out another flagship report, the first of three blueprints outlining how agriculture could play its part in preventing global heating above 1.5°C and feeding the world. The ‘Global Roadmap’ contained a ‘portfolio of solutions’, split across 10 domains with 120 recommended actions. To succeed, the plan would need annual livestock productivity increases of 1.7% (to meet assumed demand) and sectoral emissions cuts of 3% a year (to meet emissions-cutting goals). This would represent a doubling of the farm industry’s current environmental performance.
Although the roadmap set some clear milestones, including for a 25% cut in livestock methane emissions by 2030, it contained no proposals for cuts to livestock production or consumption through reducing meat and dairy or increasing plant-based diets. Instead, the vaunted 30-year effort pitched improved productivity and efficiency, as main measures promoted by the organisation. Alternative proteins are only mentioned once in the Roadmap as potentially negative for consumers due to alleged ‘nutritional deficiencies’. This again contradicts a wide body of research showing the opposite and represents a misplaced focus, as the overconsumption of red and processed meat is leading to negative health impacts in a much larger share of population, especially in the Global North, where people are shifting to alternative proteins.
It will be impossible to meet the Paris climate agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C without significantly cutting agricultural emissions, according to numerous peer-reviewed studies. Current projections estimate that much of global warming between 2030 and 2100 will originate from meat and dairy consumption.
As the debate around the climate impact of food and farming is already extremely polarised and riddled with industry-funded disinformation, it is of paramount importance that international organisations, such as the FAO, present impartial and scientifically robust reports that can serve governments as a guide for climate action in the sector.
The FAO need an overhaul of its internal review processes as well as external consultation to ensure that its future reports reflect the scientific consensus around food and climate and ensure improved methodological rigour. As a good practice, the FAO should limit the access to lobbyists and put in place transparency by publishing a full methodology and a list of authors and reviewers for its future reports. The Pathways report must also be retracted until the serious methodological errors are fixed. It is of utmost importance that for future iterations of the 2050 Roadmap, the FAO increases engagement with climate and nutritional experts as well as other UN agencies, such as the World Health Organisation, to fully embrace the potential of healthy diets containing less animal products and more plant-based foods, including in the Global South.
Nusa Urbancic is the CEO of Changing Markets Foundation, having been with the foundation since it was founded in 2015. Before joining Changing Markets, she worked for over 6 years in Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment leading its Energy programme, advocating for more climate-friendly European policies on transport fuels. Nusa has an MA in International Relations from the University of Ljubljana and an LLM in Human Rights from the London-based Birkbeck University.
