Friends of the Earth Mcdonalds Sustainable Beef

Last week I wrote near Intel'south proclamation that it was going to phase out all conflict metals from its product lines. It's a big story in the corporate responsibleness globe, but not the biggest this twelvemonth. The 1 that'southward caught my centre is McDonald'due south. In a argument that got nigh no coverage at all in the Uk, the fast-food operator has announced that information technology is to start buying certified sustainable beef from 2016.

McDonald'due south is the world's largest and well-nigh high-profile purchaser of beefiness, so this matters. If they can find a way to source sustainable beef, it could transform the entire industry. But that's a big if.

To start with, there's no definition of sustainable beef at the moment. A functioning definition needs to have in animal welfare, use of water, land degradation and a host of other factors, then task number 1 on the list is to work out what sustainable beefiness is. For that, McDonald'due south are working with the Roundtable on Sustainable Beefiness. "Given the vast differences in climate, bachelor forages and grains, water resources, management practices and labor from one beef producing region to some other around the globe, a definition must be synthetic carefully" says the roundtable website.

Once you've got a definition, you and so need to spread the word nearly information technology through the manufacture. The global beefiness industry is diverse and will be slow to respond, but with a buyer the size of McDonald'south behind it, word will spread and change volition happen. It's not something beef farmers tin beget to ignore.

It's worth noting that McDonald's program is to start buying in 2016 – and those get-go purchases will no doubt be a very pocket-size percentage of the full. "We will focus on increasing the annual amount each year, but it is as well early to predict the quantity that volition be purchased in 2016" says their director of media relations. Setting realistic targets for buying sustainable beefiness is another affair on the to-do list. This is going to be a long term project, with the eventual aim of buying 100% sustainable beef.

It's groovy that McDonald's are taking this seriously, and there's no reason to believe that they aren't genuine in their ambitions. They already serve MSC fish and a growing percentage of Rainforest Brotherhood coffee, though of course beef is a much bigger challenge. It'south also interesting that they've made this announcement with then trivial to actually show for it so far. Burt Rutherford of Beefiness Magazine suggests they're basically giving the industry a deadline. Apparently there'due south been a lot of talk about sustainable beef and niggling action, then McDonald'southward (and Walmart too, who accept like ambitions) may be using their ability to forcefulness those talks to some conclusions. That likewise, if that's the instance, is a positive development.

Notwithstanding, McDonald's long term goal of buying exclusively sustainable beefiness is where it starts to come unstuck. It's entirely possible to identify a set of environmental criteria that makes beef sustainable – if yous're raising cattle on well-watered grasslands for local consumption, for example. The problem is not raising sustainable beef, but producing enough of information technology. Like free energy, water, paper, fish, or countless other sustainability conundrums, the trouble is not the resources themselves, but excessive consumption, universalised.

In other words, the core problem is non that raising cattle is bad for the environment. The core problem is that we eat as well much beef, and the growing demand for meat is pushing ranchers to clear more land and cutting more corners. In a globe with growing numbers of hungry people, yous could feed 800 meg people with the grain currently fed to cattle in the US – I don't see how that is ethical, fifty-fifty if it can exist justified environmentally.

There is one possibility for everyone to eat all the meat they desire, and that's the synthetic meat pioneered last year, but that's a long manner off, won't exist cheap and is a difficult sell. If we want to swallow naturally raised beefiness, I don't run into any truly sustainable alternative to eating less of it. And to a multinational corporation that has to keep growing to satisfy its shareholders, the idea of eating fewer burgers is not an option.

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Source: https://earthbound.report/2014/01/21/mcdonalds-sustainable-beef-ambitions/

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