Burger King aiming to drive beef into China

A worrying situation appears to be brewing in Asia at the moment. Burger King, the world's second largest burger retailer, is aiming to expand its stake in the Chinese market. The fast food market in China is estimated to be only a $29 million industry however people believe this is set to grow considerably.

One of the problems faced by Burger King when expanding in the Chinese market is that the Chinese consumer much prefers chicken. Whilst Burger King has adapted it's menus towards chicken products it hopes to piggy back the marketing McDonalds have already undertaken in China to promote beef. This has been carried out through adverts such as the 'Feel the Beef' campaign aiming to promote the sexy Western view of beef. Apparently this advertising has already had some success in changing the views of beef in China (see Economist article).

Where the worry arises is with the potential huge increase in methane (a well know greenhouse gas) from the cows needed to produce all the additional beef for the Whoppers and Big Macs pressed upon the giant population of China. Currently cows account for 40% of methane globally which when added to the fact that methane is 20 times worse for climate change that CO2 emissions, makes the potentially huge addition to the 1.5 billion cattle worldwide a very scary prospect.

Once again there is a massive short falling in the awareness of the impact of eating large quantities of beef. A recent survey by the consultancy firm, McKinsey, found that whilst 'eating less beef' was the third best way for people to reduce their emissions only 3% of the survey respondents ranked it as such (the top two methods are drive a more fuel-efficient car and improve home insulation).

As seen from the excerpt from the BBC's Bloom website in the previous post, eating less meat (and beef in particular) can have a profound difference on climate change. So there needs to be a significant drive towards this goal and clearly promoting beef to such a potentially massive market as China definitely does not seem like the right direction to move in and appears . However on our own small scale if people can change their eating habits the whole planet can benefit.

To finish here are some recommendations for changing your eating habits:

• Eat less meat!
  
• Eat more chicken and pork - meats with the lowest climate impact because they come from animals that don't burp methane, research suggests
• Eat local meat if possible to avoid emissions from transport
• Consider soya as an alternative to dairy

Eat less meat!

This is an interesting excerpt from the BBC Bloom website about why eating less meat can be hugely beneficial for the environment. And this definitely something we can all do!

Visit here for the full article and have a play around on the rest of the Bloom website because it's very very enlightening.

"A vegan in a 4x4 can do the climate more good than a meat-eater driving a hybrid car. Food for thought?

Livestock produce more greenhouse gases than all the world's transport combined, with beef production singled out by a recent UN report as a particular enemy at the gate. Why? Because cattle belch. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 20 times worse for climate change than CO2 emissions and cattle are full of it. There are 1.5 billion cattle and buffalo worldwide, each producing more greenhouse gas in a day than the average 4x4.

According to the World Health Organisation, the average Briton eats twice the amount of protein they need in a year. By halving the amount of beef you eat, you could save almost as much CO2 as recycling for a year. By going vegan, you can slice off almost as much CO2 in a year as skipping a single return flight to India.

And cows, sheep, pigs and chickens are responsible for more emissions than just their... well, emissions. So, should we be choosing our meats more carefully?

Together, belched methane from cows and sheep, plus methane from manure, account for about 40% of global methane emissions. But that's not the whole story.

Livestock production also plays a big part in deforestation for grazing and cultivating animal feeds such as soya. Deforestation is currently responsible for a staggering quarter of all global man-made CO2 emissions.

Add to that the fact that manure and fertilisers used to grow crops to feed livestock produce two-thirds of global human emissions of nitrous oxide (a gas almost 300 times as damaging to the climate as CO2 ) and you start to see the scale of the problem.

When you crunch those numbers, a single kilo of beef can be responsible for more greenhouse gas than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home, according to 2007 Japanese research published in the journal Animal Science.

Cows can even offer vegetarians something to ruminate on - a veggie who scoffs a lot of dairy products can actually be as bad for the climate as a meat-eater. That's because the dairy industry accounts for about 23% of UK food emissions.

If the UK went the whole hog and stopped eating meat and dairy entirely, without increasing how much we eat of other foods, we would cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 8%. While this may be an unikely scenario, even eating a bit less could lower demand and reduce emissions significantly."

Food waste in the UK

One of the big problems when faced with such large issues as increased global warming, is being able to break the solutions into bite-size chunks so that the average person can actually begin to make a difference.

A recent study by WRAP - a business focused on reducing waste and boosting recycling, has shown that in the UK a third of all the food we buy ends up in the bin. This generates a total wastage of £10 billion a year.

This food waste obviously has serious consequences in terms of the amount of resources being ploughed into the growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating of food, a huge proportion of which are apparently being thrown away.

When converted into a carbon dioxide equivalents it appears that if this waste could be totally eradicated then it would have the effect of taking 1 in 5 cars of the road- a staggering statistic!

It is studies like this that can highlight areas where the average person can make a conscious effort to reduce their waste and with enough people doing so, then we can begin to make a real difference to the climate change that our carbon emissions are causing.

For the WRAP press-release click here and the Love Food Hate Waster campaign can be found here.

Algae Fuel for the future

Debate about the actual benefits of biofuels seems to have been running for a fair while now, with many studies indicating that the effects of clearing such vast swathes of land to produce these supposedly "green fuels" far outweigh the benefits in terms of greenhouse emissions (New York Times article).

There is much concern also on the escalating cost of food around the world, a situation that the production of biofuels does nothing to benefit; demand for ethanol already having caused the price of sugar to double (see BBC article)!

Targets set by the EU and the United States seem to have forced the situation of a rapid increase in biofuel production, without first considering the different techniques and setting standards in the quality of production on a global green scale. Consequently rainforests in Brazil and many other developing countries around the world are being cleared, leading to not only greenhouse emissions from their burning and ploughing but also reducing the amount of carbon sinks globally. A very worrying prospect given how these targets were predominantly set in an attempt to slow carbon emissions.


A technology that I recently heard about (see link) seems like an ingenious new way to use the carbon dioxide emissions from power stations to grow algae; the algae then being converted into biodiesel or ethanol. Testing has apparently been carried out by GreenFuel Technologies which have already demonstrated algae-based fuels powering diesel cars.

Perhaps algae will be a useful source of renewable fuel for the future or maybe not. But it certainly seems a lot more sensible that the apparently hasty shift towards biofuels, which are only serving to destroy the planet quicker in their current remit.

Food production's cost on the planet

Yesterday the BBC ran a really interesting 'cost of food' section exploring why the price of food is increasing.

One of the most interesting things for me were the shear numbers involved with the world's growing intake of meat products. The figure below (taken from the BBC) shows the increase of food intake in China per capita (a rise from 20kg to 50kg over the last 17 years) and the respective increase in resources that are needed to fund this increase; which obviously have a serious impact on the planet.



One interesting point that comes out of this diagram is the fact that we don't even have to look back as far back as the hunter-gathering neanderthals to see that our meat intake has far outgrown our requirements!

The implications of the increased food production for climate change are of course vast but only briefly touched upon in the BBC articles. As they mention, desertification is already accelerating in China and sub-Saharan Africa whilst the disruption of the water cycle causes considerable changes in other regions. This is not to mention the extra strain the production methods place on natural resources.

These BBC articles are definitely well worth a read especially as they help confirm my opinion that the quantities of meat that people eat, needs to be addressed. Hopefully, for the sake of the environment, this shift in thought will be made long before economic issues demand us to address the situation.