Eating the Planet - Feeding the world without trashing it

Friends of the Earth and Compassion in World Farming, reveals new research findings indicating that if you wish you can still enjoy meat several times a week whilst feeding the world using planet-friendly and humane farming methods. The research models future food production against different diets, farming methods and land use, and concludes that enough food can be produced to feed the growing world population with fairer and healthier diets whilst avoiding deforestation and animal cruelty. Continuing to eat more meat and dairy globally - the production of which already generates more climate-changing emissions than all of the world's transport - will push the world's climate and resources over the edge. Despite pushes from agribusiness to intensify farming to feed a growing global population that is expected to reach over nine billion by 2050, the researchers found that a diet equivalent to eating meat three times a week would allow forests to remain untouched, animals to be farmed in free-range conditions and greener farming methods to be used. With as many people obese in the West as malnourished in poor countries - roughly a billion of each - distributing protein more fairly is also an opportunity to tackle global health problems, the report points out. It calls for government to take action to measure and reduce the impact of the UK's meat and dairy production and consumption - and to switch subsidies from intensive to planet-friendly and humane farming.
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/eating_planet_qa.pdf