A/HRC/25/57 as animal feed, and if current trends continue, this will rise to 50 per cent by 2050. Demand for meat diverts food away from poor people who are unable to afford anything but cereals. Concentrated animal feeding operations, in which industrial quantities of meat are produced, have widely reported negative environmental impacts. Continuing to feed cereals to growing numbers of livestock will aggravate poverty and environmental degradation. 9. Globally, livestock production employs 1.3 billion people and sustains livelihoods for about 900 million of the world’s poor. As a major source of protein intake, meat and dairy production is a potential component in tackling undernourishment, and there are sustainable modes of meat production. But in high-income countries, the net health impacts of meat consumption are turning negative: at current levels, it is contributing to chronic diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.13 Moreover, the industrial model of cereal-fed livestock production as well as the apparently limitless expansion of pastures is creating problems that must be addressed urgently.14 In 2006, FAO estimated that grazing occupied an area equivalent to 26 per cent of the icefree terrestrial surface of the planet, while 33 per cent of total arable land was dedicated to feedcrop production – maize and soybean in particular. Thus, livestock production accounted for 70 per cent of all agricultural land and 30 per cent of the land surface of the planet,15 and the expansion of pastures and feed crops is a major source of deforestation, especially in Latin America. The FAO study estimated that the livestock sector was responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent – a larger share than transport. Once livestock respiration and the loss of greenhouse gas reductions from photosynthesis that are foregone by using large areas of land for grazing or feedcrops are taken into account, livestock is found to be responsible for 51 per cent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, so that a 25 per cent reduction in livestock products worldwide between 2009 and 2017 could result in a 12.5 per cent reduction in global atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions.16 The precise figures remain debated, but there is no doubt in the scientific community that the impacts of livestock production are massive. 10. Finally, because global food systems have been shaped to maximize efficiency gains and produce large volumes of commodities, they have failed to take distributional concerns into account. The increases in production far outstripped population growth during the period from 1960 to 2000. But these increases went hand in hand with regional specialization in a relatively narrow range of products, a process encouraged by the growth of international trade in agricultural products. The associated technological and policy choices concentrated benefits in the hands of large production units and landholders at the expense of smaller-scale producers and landless workers, resulting in the growth of inequality in rural areas and a failure to address the root causes of poverty. Of course, there were important evolutions throughout the period. The 1960s and 1970s were characterized by a State-led type of agricultural development, under which governments, eager to provide urban populations with affordable food or to export raw commodities in order to finance import substitution policies, either paid farmers very low prices for the crops produced or supported only the largest producers who could be competitive on global markets, thus accelerating rural migration. In the 1980s, the introduction in most low-income countries of 13 14 15 16 6 Arnold Tukker and others, “Environmental impacts of changes to healthier diets in Europe”, Ecological Economics, vol. 70, No. 10 (2011), p. 1776. The background research by the Columbia Environmental Law Clinic supporting this section of the report is gratefully acknowledged. FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome, 2006). R. Goodland and J. Anhang, “Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are cows, pigs, and chickens?”, World Watch, November/December 2009.