Bonnet et al. (2020) on Regulating Meat Consumption

Céline Bonnet, Zohra Bouamra-Mechemache, Vincent Réquillart, and Nicolas Treich, “Viewpoint: Regulating Meat Consumption to Improve Health, the Environment and Animal Welfare.” Food Policy 97 (101847), December 2020.

• Regulations are perhaps advisable to counter meat impacts on human health, the environment, and animal welfare.

• Many of the health effects are not externalities, in that they come in the form of increased health risks for people who consume a lot of meat.

• Some external health effects present themselves in the form of zoonoses (like Covid-19?) and antibiotic resistance. 

• On the environmental front, animal agriculture involves significant greenhouse gas emissions, along with nasty air and water pollution and deforestation.

• CAFOs could have lower per-animal greenhouse gas emissions than less intensive farming methods. Free-range settings might also undermine some dimensions of animal welfare, too, perhaps by reducing protection against predators.

• Globally, on the order of three-quarters of land used for agriculture is devoted to animal agriculture (pastures, grazing, and the growing of animal feed).

• Major animal welfare concerns include: brief lifetimes spent exclusively in close confinement; lopping off of sensitive body parts without anesthesia; and, quick disposal of male chicks for laying hens, calves for dairy cows. And the numbers of animals affected are immense. 

• "In any case, the immense challenge of evaluating animal welfare does not provide a good enough reason to ignore animal welfare, and may instead warrant a precautionary approach"

• Regulations could target producers as opposed to meat – but such approaches often are hard to implement or are ineffective.

• Meat taxes are one way to try to address environmental, health, and animal welfare concerns; better information provision is a second method. Finally, behavioral interventions, such as establishing meatless Mondays, or altering the placement of vegetarian options on menus, or even making vegetarian the default setting in some circumstances, might hold some promise.