Sustainable food production: Beyond exploitation?
Much of the food we consume today is bad for our bodies and bad for our climate – and the way it is produced also harms many of the people who make it. Impact investing means seeking another, better way…
Society is increasingly – and rightly – worried about the impact that animal agriculture is having on our climate and on our health. (My teammate Neil Goddin recently talked to Fund Calibre about improving his health by eating less meat and dairy). Covering offcuts of chicken in batter and filling sausage skins with mechanically reclaimed meat has been fantastically good for food companies’ margins – but not for our bodies.
And… workers are being exploited
There is another, less-discussed cost associated with the way much of our food is produced: the exploitation of labour it entails and the ‘externalities’ it imposes.
As heatwaves were sweeping the West coast of the US during the summer, I was reminded of a story1 I read last year. It described how migrant workers in Sonoma County continued working to bring in the grape harvest even as wildfires filled the air with smoke (opens in a new window) and the nearby population was being evacuated. These workers carve out an existence doing the jobs that their more privileged neighbours won’t. The working conditions they endure are ‘externalities’ (code for the costs of a commercial activity not borne by those who benefit from it) of our established but unsustainable food-production system.
Current systems of producing food threaten human health and environmental sustainability; plant-based foods offer a solution
42%
reduced risk of developing heart failure associated with people who eat a mostly plant-based diet
30%
of most cancers in developed countries are attributed to dietary factors, including consumption of certain meats
18-51%
of global greenhouse gas emissions are driven by livestock rearing and processing
78%
of all agricultural land is used for livestock, including grazing land and crop land, is dedicated to the production of feed
29%
of the water in agriculture is directly or indirectly used for animal production
60-70 billion
farm animals are reared for food each year
As a society, we tend to ensure that this exploitation takes place out of sight
It often happens in places where people are unable to speak up for themselves – or are sufficiently desperate that they won’t make a fuss. When a ship or oil rig reaches the end of its useful life, there is value in salvaging the steel it contains.
Maximising that value, however, means retrieving the steel in the cheapest way possible, without much care for the workers (who “risk gas explosions, falling from heights, being crushed by massive steel plates” (opens in a new window)) or the local environment2.
Clearly the energy industry’s externalities are much more than ‘just’ carbon dioxide.
Ensuring that externalities are imposed out of sight doesn’t necessarily mean removing them to the other side of the world.
Slaughterhouses are often situated in our least privileged communities, where the prospects of the human inhabitants seem to matter little. That makes it less likely that the working conditions inside them will attract much scrutiny.
In normal times, workers in slaughterhouses merely need to deal with high injury rates, fatigue and impacts on their mental health4 (opens in a new window). During the last year they also proved to be hotbeds for Covid transmission3 (opens in a new window).
Exploitation is becoming difficult to hide
Journalists and activists are taking advantage of 4G technology and miniature cameras developed for smartphones to bring the gaze of the outside world behind closed doors.
Plant operators now employ experts to sweep buildings for bugs to keep prying eyes away; shining a light on the real costs of production is not good for business.
Investors in impact funds expect us not avert our gaze
Implicit in our contract with our clients in the Artemis Positive Future fund is that the companies we invest in will attempt to safeguard all of their stakeholders. We also seek companies that are delivering disruptive change. Beyond Meat is a business that we are excited by on both counts.
Its plant-based meat alternatives get cheaper every year and we expect that it will meet its goal of under-pricing some forms of commodity animal protein within the next four years. It would thereby offer a genuine alternative to an extractive industry, one that no amount of greenwashing is ever likely to make acceptable. If it can get its teeth into some of the $1.4 trillion in revenues that the meat industry currently generates, then the materiality would be significant.
Less risk, better conditions
The new jobs that Beyond Meat is creating carry less risk and offer better working conditions than those of incumbents.
In my view, this is evidence of the additionality that meat alternatives will have, providing a solution where none previously existed and reducing some of the externalities caused by our current, unsustainable food production system.
As always, incumbents will not cede ground without a fight. They are lobbying hard and mounting legal challenges to make it illegal for plant-based alternative products to use labels like ‘burger’, ‘sausage’ or even ‘milk’. But if Beyond Meat and its peers can succeed then, as well as improving our diets and reducing the environmental impact of food production, they will also reduce the exploitation of workers: a positive sum indeed.
Jonathan Parsons is co-manager of the Artemis Positive Future fund.