by Agence France-Presse
PARIS—The world’s top authority in farm
animal health announced on Thursday it would launch a study into the role
of meat in climate change.
The report,
carried out by independent experts, is expected to be published “by the summer,” Bernard Vallat, head of the World
Organization for Animal Health, known by its French acronym of OIE, said in
Paris.
It is the first
time in its nearly 85-year history that the 175-nation OIE is to carry out an environmental
investigation.
The agency swaps
information about diseases in farm animals and issues recommendations in veterinary scares such as H5N1 avian
flu.
The probe
coincides with mounting interest in the role of meat-eating in stoking climate change.
Farm animals are
significant sources of greenhouse gases, either directly through methane emissions from digestion or indirectly, such
as clearing forests for pasture and inputs used in raising
cattle.
Vallat, who is
the OIE’s director general, said there had been a “very strong request” from member-states for the
report.
The
investigation’s scope will be limited, and it will not seek
to rival or replicate the work of the U.N.‘s global-warming scientists,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he
said.
By some
estimates, there will be a 50 percent surge in demand for animal protein by 2020 in order to feed the world’s burgeoning
population and demands from emerging economies, he said.
“Whatever
happens, we are going to have to produce more animals to feed the planet,” he told a press conference.
Celebrity vegans
such as Paul McCartney are urging consumers to boycott meat as a personal contribution to fighting climate
change.
A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef causes more greenhouse-gas and other pollution than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home, according to a 2007 study led by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba,
Japan.
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