Previous section Environmental challenges
Conclusions
The key policy challenge is to charge the industrial system with the environmental costs it creates, i.e. to fully apply the “polluter-pays” principle. Besides the difficulty of accurately measuring the costs, such a policy would raise consumer prices for livestock products, particularly affecting urban consumers who are an important policy group in many countries. Furthermore, a high degree of self-sufficiency in livestock products through the development of a modern livestock industry is a primary policy objective in many developing countries and this would most likely not be achieved, if the principle is strictly applied. By incorporating all environmental costs, many countries would lose their comparative advantage.
On the other hand, stricter environmental standards and corresponding incentives to better balance land and animal distribution could be a powerful tool to promote rural and agricultural development: prices for animal products would increase, providing land-based production incentives to intensify; and development would be more decentralised, creating employment and marketing opportunities outside the large urban centres. Such a process will have to be monitored carefully in order not to lose the technological edge by removing economies of scale and functioning infrastructure and needs to be seen in a regional development context. As has been shown, the industrial system obtains its advantage in efficiency through a combination of factors:
This has important implications for the future. The analysis shows that most expansion and productivity growth in the livestock sector will have to be sustained through the provision of concentrate feed, which normally would require additional land. The establishment of proper controls for the industrial system would then lead to intensifying livestock production through better feed conversions, and intensifying crop production aiming at higher yields. Both will reduce the land requirements for given volumes of final product and alleviate pressures on habitats and biodiversity.
Following this line of argument, measures to foster biodiversity and protection of natural resources would encourage improvements in feed conversion by removing obstacles and providing incentives for more efficient feed use. Large opportunities lie in astute pricing of concentrate feed and in providing access to related technologies. A practical difficulty lies in the cross-country nature of measures and effects when feed is imported, traded and international agreements will need to be found.
In conclusion, the industrial system poses most of the environmental problems and offers most of the possible solutions. The world's human population will increase from today's 5.5 billion to around 10 billion by the year 2030, i.e. almost double. With increasing incomes, urbanization and ageing populations, the world demand for livestock products is likely to triple, perhaps quadruple. Neither the grazing system nor the mixed farming system, as we know it, will be able to satisfy this increase in demand. The greatest part of the additional demand will have to be supplied by the industrial type of production. For this to happen, two requirements must be met: