TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042092/0420330.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 9.3 KB | 193 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 76

The Beef Against . . . Beef


Do cows cause global warming and human hunger? The fault, dear
Jeremy, lies not in our cattle but in ourselves. . .

By J. MADELEINE NASH -- With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/
New York and David S. Jackson/San Francisco


    Vermin. The word reminds most people of cockroaches
scuttling across kitchen floors and rats skulking in dark
basement corners. But to Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental
movement's most prominent polemicist, vermin are big, brown-eyed
ungulates that graze the rolling countryside, chew their cud and
moo. In his controversial new book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and
Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's
burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of
ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth
feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In
sub-Saharan Africa, cattle are contributing to desertification
by denuding arid lands of fragile vegetation. In Central and
South America, ranchers are felling tropical rain forests and
turning them into pastures for their voracious herds. "The
average cow," claims Rifkin, "eats its way through 900 lbs. of
vegetation every month. It is literally a hoofed locust."

    According to Rifkin, civilization began a long slide
downhill when 18th century British gentry acquired a taste for
fat-marbled beef and proceeded to spread that proclivity, like
a plague, throughout the Western world. Rifkin's real argument,
of course, is not with the 1.3 billion bovines that roam the
planet but with modern methods of mass-producing beef that
include plumping animals with hormones and stuffing them with
"enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people." Although
he did not personally visit a ranch or a meat-packing plant, his
stomach-churning descriptions of how cattle are treated from
birth to slaughter brim with righteous indignation. (A reformed
carnivore, Rifkin says he swore off beef 15 years ago after
taking three bites of a revolting blue-gray hamburger, then
throwing the rest away.)

    Such inflammatory rhetoric sends shudders through the U.S.
beef industry, which is already reeling from a nearly one-third
drop in per capita consumption since 1976 -- the result of
popular concern about fat in the diet. Now Rifkin hungers for
a more decisive blow. This week he is leading a coalition of
environmental, food-policy and animal-rights groups in launching
a well-financed advertising campaign aimed at slashing worldwide
beef consumption by 50% over the coming decade. Members of the
coalition range from the Rainforest Action Network, which blames
cattle for "killing the Amazon," to the Fund for Animals, which
criticizes the use of poisons and traps to control coyotes that
prey on calves. The International Rivers Network blames cattle
for wasting scarce water resources, while Food First denounces
the feedlot system for wasting grain that could otherwise be
used for human consumption.

    Not since he took on the biotechnology industry over the
safety of genetic engineering has Rifkin been embroiled in a
higher-profile controversy, or one with the potential for
greater economic consequences. With so much at stake, it is
hardly surprising that environmentalists and meat-industry
advocates have locked horns over Rifkin's charges. Among the
most notable areas of dispute:



    Cattle ranching is destroying tropical forests. Without
question, ranching is a factor in tropical deforestation, and
a major one at that. But University of Pennsylvania biologist
Daniel Janzen, for one, believes that this unfortunate epoch in
the history of Latin America is rapidly drawing to a close. In
Costa Rica, he says, "most of the pastureland that was easily
cleared of forest has already been cleared." At the same time,
the remaining forest has begun to rise in value. "Two decades
ago," explains Janzen, "the choice was simple. Either the forest
stood there, or someone tore it down to plant a crop." Now
leaders of countries like Costa Rica are beginning to view
forests as valuable assets that can help control erosion,
protect watersheds and generate income from New Age industries
like biotechnology and ecotourism.



    Cows are contributing to global warming. To a measurable
extent, they are. The symbiotic bacteria that dwell in every
cow's gut enable grazers to break down the cellulose in grass.
As a by-product, these bacteria produce considerable amounts of
methane, which, like carbon dioxide, is a heat-trapping
greenhouse gas. The methane periodically gusts forth from
grazing herds in the form of rumbling postprandial belches. But
if cattle contribute to the global methane load, they are hardly
alone. Swamps, termite mounds and rice paddies are all hosts to
similar sorts of bacterial methane factories.



    Overgrazing by cattle has destroyed grasslands. The
"cowburnt" ranges of the American West testify to the damage
wrought by decades of uncontrolled grazing, which transformed
once verdant land into desert. Of more than 50 million acres of
U.S. Forest Service land that is open to grazing, half remains
in poor condition. Lands under control of the Bureau of Land
Management are in equally bad shape. Driving the cattle off,
however, as some radical environmentalists would like, is not
necessarily the solution. Properly managed grazing, range
ecologists agree, serves to enrich rather than impoverish
grasslands. In exchange for forage, hoofed beasts deposit tons
of that old-fashioned organic fertilizer known as manure.



    Grain fed to cattle could feed the hungry. "Hunger isn't
about actual scarcity," declares Stephanie Rosenfeld, a
researcher for San Francisco-based Food First. "It's about the
maldistribution of resources. People are hungry for different
reasons at different times, but quite often the reasons have to
do with beef." The link is often very subtle: in countries like
Egypt and Mexico, for instance, farmland that formerly grew
staples for human consumption is being switched to grow grain
for beef that only the wealthy can afford. Indirectly, then, a
growing cattle population threatens humans on the low end of the
economic scale with hunger. D. Gale Johnson, an agricultural
economist at the University of Chicago, questions this
assumption. He notes that in China, beef consumption has risen
in tandem with overall improvements in diet.

    Rifkin's critics -- and there are many -- regularly accuse
him of taking a nugget of truth and enlarging it beyond reason
in ways calculated to raise public fears. "Beyond Beef is about
the worst book I've ever read," exclaims Dennis Avery, director
of Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute, a think tank in
Indianapolis. "It establishes Rifkin as the Stephen King of food
horror stories." Among other things, Rifkin raises the specter
of beef contaminated with viruses, including a bovine
immunodeficiency virus that he provocatively labels "COW AIDS,"
though there is no evidence that the virus can infect humans.
Rifkin also charges that inspection of carcasses is shoddy,
which the U.S. Department of Agriculture flatly denies.
However, even the American Meat Institute allows that the
inspection system, which still relies on visually examining and
touching meat, hasn't changed much since 1906 and needs more
up-to-date techniques to detect invisible contaminants like
microbes. Ironically, the primary tools for improvement could
well come from biotechnology, an industry that Rifkin loves to
bash.

    Rifkin is using beef as a metaphor for all that has gone
rotten in the modern world, wrongs that he attributes to a
metaphysical loss of humans' sacred relationship to nature. And
cattle, because of their prominent role in ancient mythology and
their haunting presence in prehistoric pictographs, lend
themselves well to this moralistic exercise.

    But how much blame for environmental degradation should
the cattle industry rightly shoulder? In the Netherlands, for
instance, manure from pigs poses a major ecological threat,
defiling water supplies with excessive nitrates and acidifying
local soils. Sheep have permanently scarred the landscape in
Spain and Portugal, while in India -- a country that Rifkin
praises for its kindness to cows -- bovines are ravenous wraiths
whose constant quest for food drives them to ravage standing
forests. Holy or not, most of India's 200 million cows go hungry
much of the time.

    Cutting down on beef consumption in protein-sated
countries like the U.S. is a prudent prescription that would go
a long way toward enhancing general health. Red meat is the
primary source of saturated fat in the American diet, and too
much dietary fat has been linked to the development of both
heart disease and certain types of cancer. But trimming beef in
the American diet, emphasizes Felicia Busch of the American
Dietetic Association, "will not solve world hunger, and it isn't
going to save our planet." The environmental cost of beef is
just one aspect of the multiplying burdens of producing food for
an exploding human population. The real threat to the carrying
capacity of planet Earth, dear Jeremy, comes not from our cattle
but from ourselves.