Beef cattle. Credit: K-State Research and Extension, Flickr Creative CommonsNew taxes on meat products promise to have positive effects on the environment and public health, but they are unlikely to actually lower global greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock sector, two University of Guelph economists wrote in The Conversation.
Michael von Massow, an associate professor of food economics and John Cranfield, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada argue that food consumption is not as closely tied to price as we think.
“We would need to implement huge taxes to achieve a small decrease in consumption,” they wrote, citing an example from a recent study published in Nature Climate Change journal that suggests a 40% tax on beef would only reduce beef consumption by 15%.
Instead, taxing meat products could have a number of detrimental effects, including for farmers, they say. Given that different types of meat production create different amounts of emissions, some suggest incorporating production systems into the taxes. The economists cautioned that this kind of approach could inadvertently lead to more deforestation in countries that favor cattle reared on grassland and pasture.
In addition, these taxes risk reducing the incentive to cut emissions in the sector including improving feed efficiency, they say. “At the farm level, feeding more cattle on a forage-heavy pasture diet could increase the costs of producing cattle and change the characteristics of the beef while eroding the incentive to adopt climate-friendlier production practices,” they wrote.
Last month a group of investors from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) Initiative predicted that governments worldwide will start taxing meat products due to environmental and health concerns. The FAIRR report noted that such levies were already on the agenda in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany.
Although meat taxes around the world seem like an inevitability, such levies could have unintended consequences. Even if broad-based support for these taxes were to be achieved, understanding the effect they’d have on consumers and producers, Massow and Cranfield say, is important.
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