“Less meat on the plate, more sustainable farms”

Maurizio Tropeano

Italy ranks last in Europe for per capita meat consumption: just under 33 kilos per year. The consumption of chickens, pigs and cattle continues to decrease while, according to new metric calculations, the environmental impact of stables is reduced. The results of a study by the University of Oxford applied to the Italian system by the University of Sassari highlight how Italian livestock farms have contributed to cooling the atmosphere in the last 10 years: their emissions have captured 4.4 million CO2 equivalent per year, for a total of 49 million tons in the decade.

The data was published in the book “Meat and cured meats: the new frontiers of sustainability”, by Elisabetta Bernardi, Ettore Capri and Giuseppe Pulina. And the book also highlights how cultured meat has impacts up to 25 times greater than natural meat. An element that strengthens the positions against synthetic meat. Also because “worrying data is emerging in terms of safety for citizens – according to FAO and WHO data, there are at least 53 potential dangers to our health from synthetic meat”, explains Ettore Scordamaglia, managing director of Filiera Italia. From his point of view, “there are no necessary studies that say that the consumption of artificial meat, with the addition of hormones, antibiotics and antifungals necessary to make it grow, does not involve risks”. This is why “the Italian ban on producing will serve to protect citizens, even before producers, with a precautionary principle which would prevent the EU Commission from approving such an innovative and dangerous product in such a short time through a simplified procedure such as that of novels foods”.

We will see. What is certain, however, is that in a global context in which, according to FAO estimates, the demand for food of animal origin will see a 30% increase by 2050 (+29% meat, +35% dairy products, +25% % eggs and +37% fish) it is clear that the sector will have to be able to produce more while continuing to reduce its environmental impact. A path already undertaken by the agricultural sector, which worldwide has reduced per capita emissions by 20% in 30 years against a population increase of 2.5 billion individuals.

What happens in Italy? The book published by Franco Angeli, with the contribution of Carni Sostenibili – a non-profit organization that brings together the associations of Italian meat and cured meat producers with the aim of promoting conscious consumption and the sustainable production of foods of animal origin – photographs a sector that it is worth 15% of all agri-food with a turnover of almost 30 billion euros, 513,000 employees and about 170,000 farms. “Agriculture accounts for 7.8% of the total climate-altering emissions, of which 3.5% attributable to the meat supply chains excluding milk and eggs”, explained Pulina, professor of Ethics and Sustainability of Livestock Farms at the University of Sassari and president of Sustainable Meats. According to Ispra 2023 data, in fact, the sectors whose emissions have the greatest impact on the climate remain Energy and the energy industry (55.0%) and Transport (24.7%). «But what is more important is that when it comes to the environmental impact of animal husbandry – adds the professor – we must begin to think from a perspective of balance: in this sector, in fact, emissions and their seizure take place in the same place and in the same moment”. The revisions of the metrics proposed by the group of atmospheric physicists of the University of Oxford published in Nature and applied to Italian animal husbandry by Sassari scholars on the basis of Ispra data from 1990 to 2020 lead to a reduction in impacts. “The study by the Oxford researchers takes into consideration for the first time the difference in terms of action on global warming between short-lived climate pollutants, such as methane, and long-lived climate pollutants such as carbon dioxide,” he explains. Pulina. And he adds: «The new metrics take into account this difference and in particular of how long a gas remains in the atmosphere, a substantial difference if we consider that methane has a half-life of about ten years, while carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for over a thousand years. In other words, at a constant rate of emissions, methane does not accumulate in the atmosphere and does not heat it while carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere and heats it».