At tables of the future

Op-ed published by the SDG2 Advocacy Hub, 1 October 2021.

The lives of some one billion people living in poverty depend on farm animals—on pigs or milking cows kept in the backyard, flocks of scavenging chickens, daily sales of milk or eggs in a local market, or herding cattle, sheep and goats across vast drylands.

The job of my institute is to use science to help these people transform their livestock into more sustainable and profitable livelihoods—to create ‘better lives through livestock’.

But livestock systems of all kinds have become flashpoints of bitter divides. The meat / diet / disease / climate wars have become only more intense and heated over the last 15 years or so, with apparently no ‘livestock consensus’ building in the UN Food Systems Summit dialogues.

It can be hard, in this roiling environment, to keep a level head and a civil tongue. And to keep listening. There are just so many livestock issues deeply contested, so many values diverging, so many ideologies at play, and so many agendas and narratives to track.

While I believe the shunning of milk, meat or eggs—and by implication, of livestock and livestock peoples, livelihoods and issues worldwide—will not, and should not, work, I also understand that there is much about livestock production systems to address—or redress, improve, stop or prevent—in every country of the world.

We have no time, no wiggle room, left for free passes in a globalised world where actions (or lack of actions) in any one nation can so readily affect us all. Like every other sector, livestock systems have to improve—they have to become safer, greener and more humane as well as profitable. And of course those with greater resources will have to support those with fewer. We’re all in this together. The only way out is also together.

With our planetary boundaries at risk, with climate change growing along with growing disparities in food, nutrition, health, income and natural resources, those of us working in the livestock sector, like those in the wider agriculture, energy, transport and other sectors, are going to have to pivot. Fast. We’re going to have to be highly innovative and socially just. We’re going to have to draw down from a full palette of context-specific and evidenced-based strategies and doable (and durable) solutions. One example that highlights the importance of context-specific, no?one-size-fits-all?solutions are eggs, which?have important?potential to improve nutritional outcomes in women?and in?young children’s first 1,000 days of life and therefore support nutrition equity.?Scientists in particular are going to have to flex greater muscle as well as expertise and their work has to be translated for policymakers, producers and consumers to act on.

Certainly, we’re going to have to keep talking to each other. While the emerging plethora of ‘multi-stakeholder’ initiatives, agendas, coalitions and dialogues have at times more exhausted than inspired me, the?UNFSS?and other fora like it are essential if we’re all going to find a seat at the tables of the future.

We’ll need seats at those?tables?for vegetarians as well as for meat eaters; for lab- as well as field-grown, and genetically as well as traditionally modified, products; for corporate as well as family farmers; for conventional as well as organic producers; for food processors, transporters, regulators, sellers and consumers as well as producers; for growers of cereals and vegetables, of fruits and forages and fish, as well as of livestock . . . We’ll need them all.

For me, what matters most at the tables of the future is not so much?what?we eat (or not eat) as it is?how?we eat—how we treat the soils and water and lands and animals and people that feed and nourish us.

What may end up mattering most of all is how we treat each other. Because from where I sit, livestock aren’t ‘the answer’. Or ‘the problem’.

That, of course, would be us.