The world’s top five meat and dairy companies — JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, and Fonterra — emit more greenhouse gases between them than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP, according to a new report from the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy and GRAIN. The top 20 meat and dairy companies combined emit more greenhouse gases than Germany, Canada, Australia, the UK, or France. If these companies continue on their current growth trajectories, the authors say, they will present a major obstacle to ameliorating the effects of climate change.
“More than a decade ago, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published the first global accounting of greenhouse emissions from meat and dairy, demonstrating global livestock’s role in exacerbating climate change,” the report says. “Despite these findings, the biggest meat and dairy companies remain committed to growth levels that are completely at odds with the agreement reached in Paris in 2015 by the world’s governments to keep the global temperature rise to ‘well below 2 degrees Celsius (°C),’ with the goal of limiting it to 1.5 °C.”
The report included emissions produced by the companies’ processing plants, supply chains, feed production, animals, and other factors when calculating their climate impact. Only four of the top 35 meat and dairy companies provide a comprehensive estimate of their emissions, the authors say. Those that do measure emissions rarely include those produced by their supply chain, like feed production and livestock emissions, which can comprise 80 to 90 percent of total emissions.
“The industrial livestock and dairy sectors are major contributors to climate change, but they have generally escaped scrutiny because they either don’t collect information about their impacts, or don’t take credible action on the basis of what they know,” said Olivier De Schutter, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, in a press release. “This report should encourage governments to take action to stem their further expansion.”