Our habit of feeding human foods, such as grain and soya, to farm animals will cost us $1.32tn (£1tn) a year by 2050 globally, according to environmental campaigners.
“Cheap food is something we pay for three times, once at the checkout, again in tax subsidies and again in the enormous clean up cost to our health and environment,” his colleague Philip Lymbery pointed out.
We are paying for soil erosion, water pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, and a multitude of other impacts which are passed on to the public by farmers and the sector, the conference heard. For example, our current rate of soil loss costs £400bn a year globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that water pollution in six EU states alone costs €2bn-5bn a year; and according to the European Environment Agency the current rate of biodiversity loss is reducing global GDP by 3% every year.
Feeding grain to farm animals is a particularly egregious practice, argued Stevenson. It is inherently wasteful of calories: for every 100 calories of human edible cereals fed to farm animals, just 17-30 calories enter the human food chain as milk or meat. Using publicly available and peer-reviewed data Stevenson calculated that, in terms of wasted food and calories, this single practice will cost $1.32tn a year by 2050.
The conference, attended by a broad mixture of scientists and campaigners, but also representatives from multinationals such as McDonalds, Tesco, Compass and Sodexo, would, many hoped, be the beginning of a new movement and voice to challenge the status quo.
This article was corrected on 7 October 2017. Due to an editing error, the headline gave the incorrect figure of $1bn instead of $1.32tn, while the intro incorrectly converted $1,323bn into £1bn.