Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery

Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery – review

Why the world's food system needs to be changed – now

Tristram Stuart

The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January 2014/ http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/29/farmageddon-cost-cheap-meat-lymbery-review

Every January in Berlin, thousands march against the agro-industry under the banner "Wir haben es satt!" ("We are fed up!") A fortnight ago, I went for the first time. The scale of the protest – more than 30,000 people, despite the mid-winter cold – gave me a flicker of hope. But although I addressed the crowd, and sympathise with many of its members' demands, I don't agree with their orthodoxy that large-scale farms and industrial agricultural technology are inherently wrong. Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto.

Given my suspicion of ill-informed technophobia, it was salient to read Philip Lymbery's Farmageddon. This catalogue of devastation will convince anyone who doubts that industrial farming is causing ecological meltdown. Whether it's a question of the wellbeing of individual farm animals, the biodiversity in rainforests or the harm caused to peoples such as the Toba tribe – displaced to the grim suburbs of Lima by the onward march into their traditional forests of GM soy plantations that feed European livestock – fixing the food system has to be a priority.

With every meal we eat, we choose whether or not to contribute to these problems. The businesses we buy our food from are our servants; they want to keep us happy. It follows that they will change only if we show them we are unhappy with, or, even better, enraged by, the current system.

Following Lymbery's prescriptions will not only help animals and the planet; it will also make you healthier and even, perhaps, wealthier. Eating less meat and wasting less food will offset any higher price you pay for improved animal welfare – your overall food budget will go down as noticeably as your risk of heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes.

Lymbery is particularly good on fish farming, which is often hailed as an environmentally efficient alternative to eating meat. But the facts don't add up when you consider how much wild fish has to be caught to fatten up carnivorous species such as salmon and trout. A fifth of all fish caught in the sea are now pulped into fishmeal, contributing to the over-exploitation of global fish stocks. Peru exports a million tonnes of anchoveta for this purpose every year – 13.5% of it to the UK alone. Removing these fish from the sea has not only depleted fish stocks for human consumption, it has also deprived of food the vast populations of seabirds that once fished these waters, leading to a 95% drop in numbers over the last 60 years. Violations of Peru's fishing quota laws are half-heartedly pursued, and the fishmeal-processing factories are giant quagmires of marine pollution. The producers of cheap pork in the UK are complicit in these crimes against nature: it is down the gullets of their intensively reared pigs, as well as Scottish farmed salmon, that Peruvian anchovetas disappear.

Farmed fish, in turn, are kept in such cramped conditions they rub each other's flesh raw. Lymbery describes seeing fish with tails missing, and eyes bulging out from infection. Escaped specimens breed with their wild brethren, producing future generations that are maladapted to the wild environment. Lice and other parasites that run rife in such dense populations emigrate to wild stocks and are wiping them out. Meanwhile, fish farms act as bait to hunting seals; rather than install expensive predator-proof cages, fish farmers in Scotland are permitted to gun them down – even though Defra knows this contributed to the decline in the population of harbour seals on the north and east coast of Scotland by a shocking 50% between 2001 and 2010.

On land, wildlife is faring just as badly. In the last 40 years, tree sparrow populations in the UK have crashed by 97%; grey partridges by 90%; turtle doves by 89%; corn buntings by 86%; skylarks by 61%. The catalogue of carnage goes on. One study has found four times as many worms on organic farmland as on chemical farmland – hence these declines. The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land, and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects and a barren land for birds.

Do we need all this, as proponents of industrial agriculture maintain, in order to feed the present world population of more than 7 billion people? Quite the reverse, Lymbery argues. Farm animals gobble more than a third of the world's supply of arable harvests and they waste most of this as faeces and heat. If your aim is to provide adequate nutrition for the world's billions, the fewer factory farms the better. By contrast, traditional systems let ruminants graze on grass while pigs and chickens snaffle up leftovers and forage, thus increasing, rather than decreasing, total food availability. Factory farming may also have helped to breed strains of superbugs that medicine cannot defeat because farm animals have been routinely fed antibiotics merely to increase their growth rate.

Lymbery is a pragmatic campaigner. He knows he can't overthrow the whole system in one go. He has been active in the charity Compassion in World Farming for two decades – he is now chief executive – and during that time he has selected his targets well. The book comes to life when he describes his satisfaction at achieving incremental improvements – the successful campaign, for instance, to ban "barren" cages for hens. Chickens confined to cages in Europe now have to have more space and some rather meagre recreational diversions. More significantly, and due to public demand, the percentage of free-range laying hens in the UK has risen from just 10% in the 1980s to 50% today. If chickens could organise a religion, Lymbery would be one of their saints.

He is also a passionate bird-watcher and it turns out this isn't just an annex to his arguments. We watch through his eyes as an osprey swoops and dives for a fish: a "powerful plunge, a momentary pause, then broad, fingered wings lift bird and fish from the surface and away with a shake". And then we understand what Lymbery absorbed as a bird-loving child: the chickens we confine in cages are also birds, capable, given the opportunity, of exhibiting all the behaviours we associate with wild species: attentive and tender courtship, exuberant dust-bathing, aggression. How dreadful to deprive them of all that.

I do have a quibble with the assumption, widely shared in foodie circles, that when it comes to meat, "cheap" equals "bad". Not only does this imply a price-barrier to virtue, there are examples of cheap and even free meat that is actually better than the most ethically sourced organic (and pricey) fleshy morsels. Offal and offcuts such as head and feet can be picked up for next to nothing and eating them helps to avoid waste. Besides, some wild animals, such as the invasive grey squirrel, are now so populous as to have turned the countryside into a larder of free meat.

A couple of omissions surprised me. According to the UN, endocrine disruptors – chemicals that interfere with the hormonal systems of humans and wildlife – are a hidden threat, and agricultural effluent is often the source. In an abominable 86% of UK river locations, male roach (a common freshwater fish species) have started to produce eggs alongside their semen. It may be no coincidence that fertility in human males has declined since the middle of the last century. No one has satisfactorily explained this, nor have we managed to regulate the release of these chemicals into the environment.

Lymbery rightly focuses on how much meat we eat: on average, in rich countries we eat two to three times more than is recommended. But the other side of the equation is how many people there are in the first place. When is population going to become an accepted part of the food debate? If it's fine to encourage people to think about halving their meat consumption, can we really not cope with a conversation about how many children we have?

Lymbery brings to this essential subject the perspective of a seasoned campaigner – he is informed enough to be appalled, and moderate enough to persuade us to take responsibility for the system that feeds us.

• Tristram Stuart's Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal is published by Penguin.