On Meatonomics, by David Robinson Simon

I am trying to put some thoughts together on meat taxation, so I thought a good place to start would be to comment a little bit on the 2013 book Meatonomics, by David Robinson Simon. The cover of Meatonomics includes the phrase "$414 Billion Reasons to Eat Less Meat," and the substance of the book explains where these extra (annual, 2012 dollars) costs of meat (not paid for directly by consumers or producers) come from; they are helpfully summarized in two pages (pp. 202-203) in Appendix B.

Kudos to Mr. Smith for taking on this ambitious task, and for documenting and attempting to quantify the many external costs of animal agriculture. The details undoubtedly are debatable, but what I take to be the main message -- there are huge external costs associated with meat, egg, fish, and dairy consumption in the US and that a significant tax on products containing these ingredients should be a major part of a set of policy reforms -- is one with which I agree. (And if you don't agree, your position might be altered by reading Meatonomics.)

Once the existence of sizable negative externalities is established, the economic case for corrective measures, including a so-called Pigovian tax, is fairly strong. Smith's $414 billion is more than 1.6 times consumer spending on animal foods, so a Pigovian tax would increase retail prices by something on the order of 2.5 times their existing (2012) level. [OK, this claim is actually a massive simplification or even distortion.] The higher retail prices would decrease the quantity demanded of animal foods, of course, but economic efficiency would be enhanced, as consumers began to shoulder the full social costs of their dining decisions. Mr. Smith does not propose a full Pigovian tax, however; instead, he suggests (page 172) a 50% ad valorem tax on domestic retail sales of animal-based foods, which would raise consumer prices for those products by something like 50%, too, presumably.

The precise nature of Mr. Smith's accounting of external costs is relevant for desirable policy reforms. First, some 9 percent of the external costs come in the form of subsidies to agriculture, including irrigation subsidies. (Since much of the corn crop is used for animal feed, subsidies to corn, for instance, end up supporting animal agriculture.) The externalities associated with these subsidies would best be handled by eliminating the subsidies (which are spread around to all the uses of corn, including ethanol), not through a meat tax. Second, the majority of the external costs come through impacts on health (especially increased heart disease), but it is not clear that these are externalities. (Some, such as building up of antibiotic resistance through farm antibiotic use, are classic externalities, however.) They are not direct physical externalities, like when your steel mill pollutes my air (or vice versa), but rather, they operate through the socialization of some healthcare costs -- the spillovers are financial, and would not exist if we chose not to provide some public subsidy to healthcare. Using such financial spillovers as justifications for further public interventions (here, a meat tax), is not necessarily a good idea. After all, once it is agreed that such externalities can drive policy, then any personal behavior (not getting enough exercise, say, or eating an extra dessert) seems ripe for public control: your irresponsibility is costing me money! This is not a road down which I am eager to travel, at least without a lot of consideration. (Though I do support some socialization of health care expenses -- I just don't want their availability to be made contingent on whether your behavior is judged to be sufficiently protective of the public purse.) Of course, even if there were no issues with fiscal spillovers, we should still be concerned with the health effects of consuming animal products or anything else. Do individuals understand the health risks they are running, or are these risks for some reason undercounted in individual decision making? That is, health risks can be internalities, even if they are not externalities, and taxes might be helpful to overcome internalities, too.

The environmental externalities identified in Meatonomics are, for the most part, good old-fashioned standard externalities, suggesting that the current size of the animal agriculture sector is socially excessive and a meat tax would move us in the right direction. Mr. Smith also notes the willingness-to-pay by people for less cruel methods of farming, so not only is there too much animal agriculture, it is insufficiently protective of animal interests -- even if those interests are directly ignored, and only taken into account through human willingness-to-pay.

Off-the-Farm Transparency

The promotion of transparency is a rather general issue, not one that is relegated to the animal farming industry alone. Policing and the justice system writ large are areas where there have been significant reforms in the direction of transparency in recent years. Something on the order of half of the law enforcement agencies in the US, it seems, have adopted police body camera requirements, and such cameras typically are supported by the police and by the public. (Where cameras are not required, it often is the cost -- much of which derives from the need for data storage -- that presents the major barrier.) Police interrogations now are filmed in 26 states. So in the last decade, we have witnessed a major increase in transparency in the justice system, and one that seems poised to continue. Federal and state grants, for instance, are available for easing the adoption of police body cameras, and similar types of subsidies are available for recording interrogations. It is nice to see the government promoting transparency instead of impeding it.

Animal Rights and Animal Welfare

Sometimes the issue is framed as Animal Rights versus Animal Welfare. Reality is better approximated by a continuum connecting Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, but when juxtaposed, the two "extremes" are that Animal Welfare concerns protecting the well-being of animals as they are bred and confined and worked and slaughtered to satisfy human consumption preferences, while Animal Rights concerns granting non-human animals legal protections that are comparable to those that humans enjoy, and thus much or all of animal farming (and other animal uses) would not be permitted, irrespective of the well-being of the animals involved. (The internet is full of rather tendentious descriptions of the differences between animal welfare and animal rights.) The work of Professor Temple Grandin, mentioned in the immediately prior post, is in the Animal Welfare tradition, while the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project, unsurprisingly, is exemplary of the Animal Rights approach.

The tension between animal rights and animal welfare orientations is felt in many other areas of public policy. Often the conflicting approaches can be characterized as "harm reduction" versus "zero tolerance." Should prostitution or cocaine use be made more safe, or should the focus be on eliminating these behaviors entirely? Matters aren't always so stark. Many people who see abolition as an ultimate goal might support ameliorative measures in the meantime -- and perhaps even if those ameliorative measures, in the short-term, increase the frequency of the targeted behavior.

For people who object to the notion of animal agriculture, more humane slaughterhouses incorporating non-slip floors in livestock unloading areas, for instance, can be rather repugnant. Nonetheless, efforts to improve "welfare" in this sense need not surely come at the expense of promoting abolition -- though I hope I am not being too optimistic on this score. Broader discussion of animal welfare improvements and animal agricultural practices might assuage enough consciences that the industry is prolonged and strengthened -- but these discussions might also open doors to deeper reforms and more extensive mental conversions, while actually improving the welfare of farmed animals in the here and now. On a personal level, "reductarianism" or vegetarianism might be helpful way stations -- even if a vegan lifestyle is the more appropriate long-term goal.

The other potential trade-off that sometimes is invoked in non-human animal policy discussions is that devotion of effort to animal welfare detracts from attention to or concern with human welfare. But again, this trade-off is not a logical necessity -- and in practice, rather the opposite seems to be the case.

More on Farm Transparency: The Glass Walls Videos

The North American Meat Institute has sponsored a series of videos featuring Professor Temple Grandin that aim to show how animal slaughtering works in practice. The videos are intended to offer transparency: they are entitled Glass Walls videos. They show (to at least some extent) all the stages of operations in slaughterhouses -- slaughterhouses that are working properly, that is, as legal and industry standards require. These videos are hard to watch, but the fact that they exist indicates that the meat industry itself wants transparency, or at least wants to be seen as wanting transparency. So why not make the cameras permanent and the video public, a' la what Fair Oaks Farms has committed to?

The Impossible Burger

Burger King has made the plant-based Impossible Whopper available at all its US locations, prompting me to visit a Burger King for the first time (and then, shortly after, the second time) in memory. White Castle and Red Robin are other establishments in which I have sampled Impossible-based burger-like creations. I am among those who wouldn't be able to tell, if I did not know, whether the Impossible versions are meat-based or not. Recently, I had a lunch at an old-school American-style diner that included a plant-based Beyond Burger on its menu, while also emphasizing (via a large sign) that its vegetable soup was vegetarian. Beyond Meat features an impressive array of professional athletes who serve as Beyond Ambassadors.

The revolution is underway. Plant-based pseudo-hamburgers will get tastier and tastier, and eventually, they will be cheaper (perhaps quite a bit cheaper) than meat burgers: feeding bushel after bushel of grain to livestock for many months to produce burgers will have a hard time competing with taking a tiny fraction of that grain and making the burger directly. (We are slowing the transition through policies that subsidize the production of grain.) There are some positive feedback mechanisms built-in, too. Start with a small vegan vanguard of environmentalists, animal welfare activists, and health-conscious consumers, use them to jumpstart an industry, induce quality to rise and prices to fall, and watch as the eating of traditional meat transforms into a practice that becomes socially suspect. No doubt there will still be traditionally-produced meat that is eaten, just as hunting has not disappeared, but it will become a niche behavior, and one that many parents will want to shield their children from.

And then there is the coming clean meat alternative...

Promoting Farm Transparency

The recent New York Times article by Matt Richtel that provoked the previous blog post notes the difficulties that researchers and health officials face in attempting to learn about farm conditions, even when there is evidence that those conditions are exacting a huge human toll in disease and death. There seems a lot to be said for full transparency on large-scale farms (or concentrated animal feeding operations, CAFOs). Why should the public have to rely on undercover footage (the collection of which is often illegal) to know what is happening on farms and slaughterhouses and other elements (e.g., transport) in the meat supply chain?

The recent exposure of activities at Fair Oaks Farms (a dairy) brought a pledge (see the 2:15 point of the founder's video response) to provide full video surveillance (with public access to the videos) of all farm areas where humans and non-human animals interact. A further pledge has been made (4:30 mark) to solicit frequent, unannounced visits to the farm by an animal welfare expert. Fair Oaks Farms is documenting their ongoing response here.

While it is too soon to know the long-term effectiveness of the reforms at Fair Oaks Farms, and while it may be that the dairy industry descends from unpardonable and ongoing original sins, why can't the video and unannounced audit reforms adopted by Fair Oaks become standard? Even if the only motive is to protect human health (as opposed to protecting the welfare of the farm animals themselves), there is a strong case for transparency in CAFOs.

Although a legal requirement for such transparency does not seem to be on the horizon in many places in the US -- witness those ag-gag laws -- private actions might spur the requisite reform (as in the Fair Oaks Farms case). Certification programs can add enhanced transparency requirements into their standards. Foundations or NGOs could subsidize the acquisition and maintenance of monitoring equipment. Other sorts of agricultural subsidies or benefits could be made contingent on farm transparency. Pressure could be brought on major purchasers (fast food outlets, grocery chains) to only deal with transparent suppliers. There's tons of room for a more radicalized transparency in the food system.

No one enjoys seeing the video evidence of cruel treatment of farm animals; but the easier it is to see it, the less there will be to see.

Antibiotic Administration to Farm Animals

Yesterday's New York Times features a superb front-page story by Matt Richtel about antibiotic resistance that passes to humans after originating from large quantities of antibiotics administered to farm animals; when people get ill from the resistant salmonella (or E. coli), multiple types of standard antibiotics are rendered useless. Maryn McKenna's 2017 book Big Chicken (subtitled "The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats") gave prominence to the story, and much detail. I had thought that the routine use of antibiotics on industrial farms came from the need to control disease in the terrible conditions on those farms, together with the breeding of animals with traits (such as fast growth) that are economically valuable but bring a health cost. This does seem to be the case, but I learned from Big Chicken that widespread administration of antibiotics to farm animals originated after it was discovered that the antibiotics themselves served as growth promoters. The use of antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock is now (since 2006) banned in the EU, and contravenes FDA guidelines in the US. (The World Health Organization also has weighed in.) There is some evidence that farm use of antibiotics (or antimicrobials) has been declining in the US and in the EU in recent years, though in the US, purchases of antibiotics for farm animals far exceed quantities purchased for human use.

Richtel's article highlights the difficulties that researchers and public health workers have in accessing farms and farm-level data, even when evidence points to farms as the source of outbreaks of resistant diseases in humans. The lack of access to farms risks prolongation of such outbreaks -- a high price to pay to allay concerns that some farms might have their reputations unfairly besmirched.