@kim_harding

Absolutely worth reading! 🖤

“It really isn’t about the crop, like rubber in this case, but about the system in which different commodities are produced, traded and consumed and the length of the value chain associated with them.”

Additionally, the study finds that in some countries, palm oil has expanded into areas where rubber was traditionally grown, with new rubber plantations then being established elsewhere, driving further deforestation.

“Because rubber is non-perishable and can travel long distances, the typical top-down approach of tracing things for rubber is difficult. You don’t know how the rubber got to the processing facility.

“I think that challenge is actually better addressed from the bottom up, as pioneered by the Forest Stewardship Council who work with smallholder cooperatives. These cooperatives can jointly negotiate a price and can collectively say that the rubber comes from this region, versus millions of smallholders competing for an already very low rubber price.”

She [Dr. Antje Ahrends, one of the authors] adds that it is “absolutely” critical that the EU deforestation regulators distinguish between farmers renewing existing rubber plantations and new deforestation of natural forest for new plantations.

The intent of the study is “not to demonise, but encourage smallholder production”, while also ensuring rubber does not lead to continued deforestation, Ahrends says. She adds:

“Rubber is a really good income source for smallholders, if it can be managed properly. It can store between 50 to 250 tonnes of carbon per hectare. If you have the choice between a field of pineapple and field of rubber, rubber is also environmentally the better choice: less pesticide, more carbon storage, better longevity, you can intercrop it, form agroforests you could never do with pineapple.

“Natural rubber is also much better than synthetic rubber, which is produced from, essentially, fossil fuels.”

Ahrends stresses the importance of educating farmers to minimise deforestation and form cooperatives to use fewer pesticides and not “overtap” trees, so that plantations do not need to be replaced so quickly. Rubber trees typically have an economic lifetime of 20 to 30 years.

Meijaard says it is important to look at how governments decide to allocate land for agricultural production and how to design land use optimally to deliver the highest environmental opportunities and retain natural areas. He tells Carbon Brief:

“I hope that the global discussion around this paper is not going to be ‘my god, we have another devastating crop that’s wiping out Indonesian rainforest’. That’s not particularly useful. The discussion I hope we have and should all be involved in is: how do you produce the commodities that the world needs and requires most optimally, from a nutritional, social and an environmental perspective?”

#smallholderAgriculture #Agroecology #PeasantFarming

@RadicalAnthro

From the perspective of animal welfare, lab meat makes sense.

Environmentally, the answer is not so clear in the case of free ranging beef when including soil carbon storage in grassland-rumiant ecosystems. Admittedly, the grasslands would need to be managed very biodiversity-friendly and there are simply not enough grasslands to feed 9 billion people with a western meat overconsupmtion habits.
And for pig & poultry, except in a backyard or really smallscale farms there is anyway no sustainable production.

So, for an electricity-based meat production (btw, where do they source their raw materials? Recycled organic wastes? Legumes?), we need to consider the direct and indirect emissions of the electricity system. In many countries, the share of renewables is on the rise, but currently, solar and wind are mainly adding production capacity to cover the increases in consumption, with only slight decreases in total emissions of the energy sector because coal, gas and oil are still burned. All the promoters of tech-solutions assume that their product will use only zero emission electricity, without having marginal effects on the whole system.

Then there is the health perspective: Although I cheer every meat alternative that helps to bring down factory farming, I am reluctant of ultraprocessed foods produced by intransparent companies (But that is not my field of expertise, more a gut-feeling).

And finally, what I think is the most important point and also interesting for anthropologists: the dependence on highly centralized and technizised systems for food production is not a good idea. Not for resilience as they have vulnerable supply chains (a lab needs many components from different parts pf the world, starting with latex gloves). And not from a cultural perspective, as food production is an inherent part of human subsistence. It is unwise, to be totally disconnected from the people that produce our food and their way of live.

#AgroEcology #PeasantFarming #LabMeat #ArtificialMeat #Meat #LessMeat #Vegetarian #Vegan