This is the best summary I could come up with:
Another FAO official, “Michel Criollo” (not his real name), remembered: “No one wanted to go to the next step of saying agriculture is a problem for the planet and we need to mitigate it – including by potentially reducing production levels or changing things in less profitable ways.”
The big meat-producing countries – Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, Australia and the US – all complained to the FAO’s higher echelons, according to Steinfeld, while protests also flooded in from “the private sector, the large-scale meat, feed and dairy producers”.
Hans R Herren, a World Food Prize winner and co-chair of the UN/World Bank Global Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology (IAASTD), told the Guardian: “It’s clear that there is corridor pressure by the main agri-producers in the FAO.
One recent paper by Matthew Hayek, the assistant professor in environmental sciences at New York University, said that the FAO’s use of modelling – rather than verifiable monitoring data – could underestimate methane emissions from livestock by up to 90% in countries such as the US.
Although there is growing awareness of the impact that high meat and dairy consumption has on certain countries’ carbon footprints, politicians are, in the main, profoundly reluctant to tackle the issue, particularly in this era of culture wars.
The Netherlands, one of the few countries to have bravely announced a livestock reduction plan (although officially to reduce nitrogen – rather than methane – emissions) has seen a huge political challenge from the rightwing Farmer’s Party as a result.
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