Sustainability and the truth

Dr Judith Bryans, chief executive of Dairy UK, shows why the world needs to rethink how it views the dairy industry and the environment.

It’s not boring, and it¹s critical that the dairy industry gets it right. These are the words I found myself saying to someone recently who was telling me they found it difficult to engage people on environmental issues because they didn¹t think it was a sexy subject. Okay, carbon leakage, water usage and waste material may not be the sexiest phrases in the English language. However, with the world¹s population heading rapidly towards eight billion people in the next decade, the earth¹s resources being limited and a significant lobbying effort worldwide for diets to be plant based and for
fewer animal products to be consumed, they are not just phrases, but issues we have to embrace and do something about.

What’s ignited this rant, you might ask? I¹ll tell you. I¹ve just spent some time reviewing a series of reports and papers that have come out of venerable institutions around the world over the last year on sustainability and environmental issues and found myself getting more agitated about all of the subjective mathematical modelling being used to churn out and justify recommendations for people to eat more plant food and cut their dairy intake. Few if any have considered the consequences for food security and health. Few have considered the economic feasibility of shifting agricultural patterns and dietary preferences and few have considered the significant strides the dairy industry has made and continues to make in reducing its environmental footprint.

Big players

One of the most recent documents to make a recommendation to cut dairy consumption by a whopping 50 per cent has come from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) study, ‘Nitrogen on the table: The influence of food choices on nitrogen emissions and the European environment.’

Conducted by the UNECE Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen, the aim of the study is to provide policy makers with scientific evidence to support international decision making on environmental policies – particularly when these link air pollution with water, soil, climate and biodiversity. The main question being asked in this study is what the consequences for the environment and human health would be if EU consumers were to replace part of their meat and dairy consumption with eggs and plant based foods. Their answer was that a 50 per cent reduction in meat and dairy consumption would reduce the nitrogen footprint of EU citizens by 40 per cent, reduce saturated fat intakes and free up land for cereal production and biofuels. While we all support a need to address environmental issues, what has been issued so far into the public domain on this piece of work is flawed. Its recommendations are based on a narrowly focused analysis that gives little consideration to the broader impact this recommendation would have on sustainability, nutritional health, other environmental measures, economics, the feasibility of changing food systems and food choice.

We know well in the dairy industry that all food production comes at an environmental cost. This cost should be balanced with the food¹s nutritional value and its potential positive contribution to the environment, as well as its negative impact.

Effective improvement in the environmental impact of the food industry can only be achieved when we all work together to upscale the performance of our existing supply chains. Using the roadmap

In the UK, the dairy industry continues to push ahead, with the supply chain working very effectively together to deliver improvements in its environmental performance through the Dairy Roadmap. The roadmap, which has been in place for some time now, regularly sets new and challenging targets for improving the environmental performance of the UK dairy industry. The industry has already demonstrated significant progress as a result. In addition, Dairy UK has just started work on a biodiversity strategy for processing plants. This strategy is being taken forward under the guidance of our Sustainability and Environment committee.

This strategy will review what biodiversity measures are already in place and offer a range of options to encourage biodiversity at sites, based on
their location. Processing sites in the UK have a broad range of locations ­ industrial, urban, suburban and rural. The strategy will recognise this and offer options, including a range of options that will work for each setting. For example, this would mean setting aside land for those in a rural environment or working with the local community on a biodiversity project for those in an urban or suburban setting. This biodiversity strategy will recognise the increasing importance to EU citizens of biodiversity and natural habitats. When completed in the coming months, it will also form part of our commitments under the wider Roadmap.

For some time, DairyCo and The Dairy Council have been working with the University of Reading, RAND International and ADAS on a piece of work to show the value of diets that include dairy products and dairy farming to human health and the environment. Results of that work will be disseminated as soon as they are available. Those joint initiatives are on top of what is already being done by processors and farmers at an individual level.

Action on the agenda

Globally, the dairy industry is working to address environmental issues through a range of initiatives including the Global Dairy Agenda for Action and the Global Sustainability Framework. In combination with national initiatives, the dairy sector is rightly regarded as foremost in agricultural sectors in addressing the challenge of sustainability. When we see reports such as ‘Nitrogen on the Table,’ we ask ourselves, what is it about the groups conducting these studies that makes them ignore what the dairy industry is doing nationally and globally? Even if the changes they are suggesting could be made within the EU, which we don’t believe they can or should be, they surely must recognise that the EU no longer stands in isolation from the global food economy. Changes within agriculture within the EU can induce indirect land use change in other parts of the world. This can create a myriad of unintended consequences that would fall outside the control of the EU. There are no guarantees that any policy action to change consumption habits in the EU will have beneficial effects.

Ensuring that environmental policy tools deliver genuine positive outcomes means that initiatives that show quantifiable improvements in existing supply chains should be the basis of environmental policy going forwards.This will have a far better impact on diet and sustainability measures than radical unachievable recommendations.