Jeff Sebo
We propose a global ban on industrial animal agriculture by 2050 because this food system causes massive, unnecessary, and transboundary harm to humans, animals, and the environment. Addressing these harms requires international coordination, inspired by successful efforts to regulate or ban other harmful products or processes, ranging from mercury and tobacco to child labor and torture of enemy combatants. This contribution summarizes the key legal rationale, precedents, and instruments for our proposed ban.
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Felix Aiwanger
Despite mounting scientific and ethical consensus about the multiple harms of meat production for animals, humans and the environment, current regulatory frameworks largely fail to internalise these costs. On the one hand, animal agriculture is resource-intensive, contributing significantly to climate change, deforestation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss. On the other, it entails systemic ethical issues with regard to the breeding, keeping and killing of animals. This contribution explores the legal feasibility of a cap-and-trade system for meat designed to address the multifaceted harms of animal agriculture and to push meat products closer to their true price.
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Minna Kanerva
Meat consumption corridors are a tool for transforming the current meat system. In a fair and just manner, they are intended – both conceptually and in practice – to help bring high meat consumption down to levels that can be considered ecologically sustainable and socially acceptable. Accordingly, this tool also supports scaling down and moving away from industrial animal agriculture.
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Kirsi-Maria Halonen
Public institutions, such as schools, hospitals, prisons, and military bases, serve millions of meals every day. This makes governments some of the largest food purchasers in the world. With such immense buying power, the question arises: could public procurement be used as a tool to promote more sustainable, plant-based diets and reduce meat consumption? The concept of leveraging public procurement law to encourage meat-free meals is gaining momentum. But while the potential is significant, the path forward is anything but simple.
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Romain Espinosa, Nicolas Treich
Meat consumption imposes externalities on farmed animals. According to basic economic principles, such negative externalities can be addressed through corrective measures, such as taxation, which align private costs with the broader social costs. This raises a novel policy question: should meat be taxed to account for its impact on animal welfare, and if so, what would be the appropriate level of taxation?
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Cass Sunstein
In the last decades, we have learned a great deal about how human beings think and act. We now know far more about our species than we ever did. What we have learned tells us what we might do to change current behavior. In particular, we know a lot about what we might do to nudge meat-free eating. Let’s start with people, and then turn to behavior change.
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Einat Albin
Animal rights discourse involves a persistent tension between the welfare paradigm and the fundamental rights approach. As an alternative to both, I argue that labour entitlements offer a more promising and pragmatic path forward. This framework places the legal approach to animals within a framework that recognises both their economic contribution and their subordination to capital.
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Laura Burgers
In light of prevalent nationalist populism, what type of strategic litigation against the meat and dairy industry is likely to be most transformative? Activists formulating their strategy need to consider the interrelated questions of what interests to highlight, whom to sue, and what legal norms to invoke, whilst being aware that nationalist populists will try to use any judgement to their advantage.
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Rebecca Williams
Increasingly, the climate impact of our diet is being recognised. The uncomfortable knowledge that the contents of our dinners can affect planetary health makes the issue of mitigating these emissions contentious, particularly with regard to our consumption of animal products. The role law has historically played and is still playing in creating the current levels of livestock production is often displaced in this debate – instead, we often focus on individual consumer choice or the perceived responsibility of farmers to consider sustainability in their farming practices.
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André Nollkaemper
While global meat governance currently faces significant political obstacles to transformative change, early signs point toward a shift toward a more sustainable and responsible global food system. The extension of legal principles such as the no-harm rule to climate change, the emergence of a global governance complex, normative frameworks like One Health, and the recent proliferation of policy initiatives may even signal the early formation of a new global food system architecture. Driven by bottom-up forces, these developments have the potential to reshape current practices and advance sustainable meat governance.
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Anne Peters
The legal barriers erected by international trade law tend to stymie animal welfare policies. States might, in good faith, fear to violate international trade law. They also use the international trade regimes as a scapegoat for not promoting animal welfare domestically. This happened in Switzerland with foie gras, a cruelty meat product which, after discussion in Parliament, has not been prohibited. The argument was that a market ban might violate WTO law.
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Cleo Verkuijl
For decades, the global community has grappled with the increasingly urgent need for an equitable transition away from fossil fuels – achieving some, but inadequate, progress. Today, there is growing recognition that meat and other animal products, particularly from the industrial systems that enable high levels of meat consumption, also have far-reaching environmental, public health, and social impacts. This industry will need to transform on a similar time frame in order to achieve climate and broader sustainable development goals.
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Jennifer Jacquet
Just like the fossil fuel industry, the meat industry teamed up with trade associations, public relations, and “merchants of doubt” to distribute disinformation, downplay their role in global warming, and influence climate policy. Our research showed that all of the 10 largest U.S. meat and dairy companies had directly contributed to efforts that minimized the link between animal agriculture and climate change. For eight of the 10 companies, we found evidence of lobbying on climate issues between 2000 and 2019.Just like the fossil fuel industry, the meat industry teamed up with trade associations, public relations, and “merchants of doubt” to distribute disinformation, downplay their role in global warming, and influence climate policy.
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Odile Ammann
Despite the negative externalities of meat production, be it for public health, the environment, and, of course, animals themselves, the consumption of meat is still on the rise in many countries in the world, and the regulation of meat production remains lax. One important reason for this lies in the influence that the meat industry has been exerting on lawmaking.
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Kristen Stilt
Serious zoonotic risks are inherent in intensive animal production and also in non-intensive animal production. Production scale does not make one type more or less dangerous or immune. Zoonotic disease risk is one compelling justification, among many other reasons discussed in the other contributions to this debate, for transformative meat governance. The issues are urgent, and the time is now. We cannot wait for the next major crisis, the next pandemic, or the next headline news of another animal cruelty exposé in the animal agriculture industry.
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Marco Springmann
It is now well-established that our diets and the food systems underpinning them have substantial impacts on both our health and the environment. What is also clear is that without dietary changes towards more balanced and predominantly plant-based diets, there is little chance of limiting global warming, biodiversity loss, and environmental resource use and pollution more generally. This contribution summarises research on the environmental, health, and social aspects related to changes in diets and food systems with a particular focus on the role of animal source foods.
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Paola Cavalieri
For centuries, philosophical debates on killing animals for food have been self-servingly distorted. And now that the animal-industrial complex has become a global killing machinery, traditional critical thinkers remain silent on nonhuman exploitation. This contribution challenges this silence, trusting in the new radical oppositional thinking.
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Saskia Stucki
“Defund Meat” may be an unusual and perhaps provocative title for a critical interdisciplinary discussion around meat in the Anthropocene. At first blush, it may sound like a crude activist slogan, or a hopelessly idealistic call for abolishing the meat system. Upon closer examination, however, it turns out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. As I shall argue, defunding meat is a much more commonsensical, pragmatic, and mainstream(able) proposition than its radical overtone might initially suggest.
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