Winners and losers—every major transition has them. For the world to meet its climate goals, it needs to undergo a partial shift away from traditional meat and toward alternative proteins. But who would be the winners and losers of a global protein transition? In Episode 6, we investigate what this transition might look like and what it could mean for national security and geopolitics.
Transcript
This transcript was not edited prior to publication.
Barbecue Earth
Episode 6 Transcript
HEEWON PARK: Winners and losers. Every major transition has them. With the transition to clean energy, we expect that major oil producers will lose revenue, and coal miners will lose their jobs.
NOAH GORDON: Meanwhile, those who dominate the production of clean energy technologies like batteries and solar panels really have a lot to gain.
HEEWON PARK: A partial transition to alternative proteins–which has to happen for the world to meet its climate goals–would also create winners and losers.
NOAH GORDON: But who would they be? And what would this transition mean for national security?
HEEWON PARK: In this episode, we examine what this future of meat might look like. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’re listening to Barbecue Earth.
— — —
NOAH GORDON: Episode 6 - Food Security Reimagined
HEEWON PARK: Which resources are vital for national security? You might think of tanks, semiconductors, or steel factories. But you almost certainly don't think of lentil soup or vegan nuggets. Jon Bateman is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he thinks we should reconsider this.
JON BATEMAN: If you look at President Biden's official national security strategy, it divides U.S. national security goals into a couple buckets. One of those buckets is what it calls global challenges. And if you look at those top three global challenges, they all are relevant to alternative proteins. Food security, climate change, pandemic prevention – in each of those areas, alternative proteins have a good shot at not solving the problem, but being one of the major contributors to addressing these problems.
HEEWON PARK: Let’s start with food security.
JON BATEMAN: For most of human history, access to food has been essential for maintaining social cohesion and even military functioning. It's long been said that an army marches on its stomach, so being able to just feed your troops is a national security risk that people millennia ago would have understood. Of course, today we live in a more complicated world, and one of the main problems with contemporary meat production is its inordinate inefficiency. Meat and livestock rearing creates an incredible, unnecessary demand for energy, water, crop inputs, land and other things like that.
HEEWON PARK: This inefficiency drives a lot of different security issues. For instance, while the U.S. generally has lower food insecurity than many other countries, our inefficient agriculture system makes us vulnerable to food insecurity caused by geopolitical shocks. Here’s Liz Specht, the Senior Vice President for Science and Technology at The Good Food Institute.
LIZ SPECHT: I think one example of that that we're all feeling globally right now is the current kind of global grain shortage and price spikes that are resulting from a number of different factors, not just the war in Ukraine, but droughts and lower crop yields due to climatic events, a number of things. So, you know, a third of global grain is currently fed to animals. So that continued reliance on animal agriculture just makes it that much harder for us to have global resiliency.
HEEWON PARK: You can already see how the issue of food security is incentivizing some countries to become leaders in the alternative protein space.
LIZ SPECHT: Singapore has an initiative called 30 by 30, which is a goal to get 30% of their country's nutritional needs produced locally in Singapore by the year 2030. Right now they import upwards of 90% of their food calories. So they are very interested in these technologies that allow for more localized production, domestic production in areas where there's otherwise not a lot of agricultural sort of resource or land availability.
HEEWON PARK: This is true in places like Israel and China, too. Here's Noah Gordon, co-director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Climate, Sustainability, and Geopolitics program.
NOAH GORDON: The scarcity of water and land in Israel means it imports most of their grains from overseas, and it has a strong incentive to become a leader in alternative proteins–and it’s done that. And in China’s case, the country is increasingly reliant on foreign food imports due to decreasing amounts of arable land. It’s also had several deadly food safety scandals that have led many Chinese people to trust foreign brands over local ones.
HEEWON PARK: Beyond food security, alternative proteins can also address another global threat. Bateman says this threat is an issue that humans have faced for as long as we’ve existed: disease.
JON BATEMAN: One of the most famous and devastating pandemics in modern human history was the 1918 so-called Spanish flu. Most people don't think it actually originated in Spain. We don't know exactly where it originated, but it killed millions around the world, and there's some evidence that it might have actually originated on a US swine farm. Now, 1918 was well before the era of concentrated factory farming that we have today. And those conditions really breed disease in a variety of different fashions.
HEEWON: To start, there’s the physical closeness of all these animals. In Episode 1, we examined concentrated animal feeding operations, or factory farms, where animals are housed in confined spaces literally cheek to cheek, with their waste stored in huge manure lagoons. But another problem is the actual DNA of these farm animals.
JON BATEMAN: The genetics of these animals are highly homogenous because they've been genetically bred to be as efficient as possible in terms of meat production and rapid growth. But this creates a condition whereby disease can spread very rapidly within these populations. So, for example, there have been instances where turkeys that spend part of their time outdoors are exposed to the overflight of migratory birds, and the falling excrement from those birds can then infect those turkeys. And then, because of the conditions of a factory farm, could jump to a human worker in a way that you might not see in another place.
HEEWON PARK: As the world continues to become more and more connected, the risk escalates for both the birth and spread of disease among these factory farm animals. The world has already seen how merciless disease can be when it comes to animal agriculture.
LIZ SPECHT: So, think of things like African swine fever virus wiping out nearly 50% of China's pork production over the course of a year or two. Think about things like the H5N1 avian flu that's sweeping the entire world right now and is causing huge volatility and flock loss.
HEEWON PARK: And that’s not all. According to Bateman, our agricultural system is threatening even the tools we have to fight off these types of diseases.
JON BATEMAN: Everyone's familiar with antibiotics, penicillin. These are maybe the greatest or among the greatest public health innovations of modern times. But our ability to continue using those magical medicines is under threat by the overuse of antibiotics, which essentially causes the bacteria to evolve in such a way that it would be resistant to today's and potentially to future antibiotics.
HEEWON PARK: This type of microbial resistance is a huge problem. It’s why you shouldn’t flush old antibiotics down the toilet into the sewage system. And it’s another reason why our animal agriculture system needs to change.
JON BATEMAN: The problem with factory farms is that animal agriculture is actually the primary, even overwhelming user of medically significant antibiotics. Mostly, they're not going to hospitals. They're going to factory farms, for two reasons. One is to combat disease for these animals that are kept in incredibly unsanitary and unhealthy conditions. And the other, unfortunately, is sometimes to stimulate the growth of the animals as well. This tremendous use of these antibiotics in factory farms then creates conditions whereby so-called superbugs can gradually evolve over time.
HEEWON PARK: Think about the next global pandemic—the next COVID-19. Many public health experts do expect that the next pandemic will also be a virus, not a bacteria that you can treat with antibiotics. But even in a viral pandemic, ineffective antibiotics would pose a huge problem.
JON BATEMAN: What we've seen in COVID-19 is that there can be an interactive effect between a viral pandemic and bacteria. So, for example, if you look at the death certificates and medical records of people who die of COVID-19, often COVID-19 is what gets you into the hospital, but you may ultimately succumb to a co-morbidity like pneumonia. Pneumonia is a bacteria, and you can combat that using antibacterial measures. It would be terrible to find ourselves in a place where a future COVID-19 like pandemic arises and there's millions of people dying of some kind of hybrid pneumonia that we can no longer treat through antibiotics because of overuse in factory farming.
HEEWON PARK: Reducing animal agriculture and increasing alternative proteins is a path toward improved food security and public health. Bateman says it’s also a path toward strategic competition on the global stage, too.
JON BATEMAN: We're living in an age where U.S. policymakers who are in charge of national security are increasingly worried about what's called strategic or emerging critical technologies, wanting to maintain U.S. leadership in control of the next wave of artificial intelligence, 5G, semiconductors, and on and on. Biotech is a growing part of this panoply of strategic technologies, and within that, alternative proteins have many of the same rough characteristics as some of these other critical tech areas. So, for example, it's high value add. It's a large potential market with many spinoff or catalyzing connections to other areas of biotech. It's a form of advanced manufacturing.
HEEWON PARK: Alternative proteins have triggered cultural backlash in some circles–think of how Italy has banned cultivated meat, or how Wisconsin Senators are trying to keep oat milk down. But still, Specht says there is some bipartisan support for alternative protein research.
LIZ SPECHT: There's been bipartisan support for these initiatives to get, say, research funding directed towards alternative proteins. There's a strong kind of jobs and economic security angle and global competitiveness in terms of technology. So I think that is not restricted to any one political party.
HEEWON PARK: Alternative proteins show what the future of meat might look like. But what will this shift away from traditional livestock farming mean for the economies and politics of different countries around the world? Coming up next after this short break, we think through who will emerge as winners and losers in the protein transition, and where the US will be left standing.
AUDIO (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Advertisement): Thanks for listening to this audio production from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. If you enjoy this program, make sure to check out other audio series and podcasts from Carnegie, including The World Unpacked, our biweekly breakdown of today’s hottest global issues, with experts, journalists, and policy makers. Subscribe to Carnegie podcasts on popular podcast platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Now back to the show.
— — —
HEEWON PARK: Just because something is necessary doesn’t mean it will be easy. Noah Gordon and Jon Bateman say that a major shift away from animal meat won’t happen overnight, and there will be growing pains.
NOAH GORDON: Look, there’s a reason agriculture is called a “hard-to-abate” sector. We need to produce a lot of food and we’ll have to have some negative emissions to cancel out the remaining emissions from agriculture, even in a net-zero world in future decades. But, eventually, there will be a shift, and like any transition, it will create winners and losers. When it comes to the energy transition, we worry for the future of oil producers like Nigeria or Bolivia.
JON BATEMAN: The winners and losers of a protein transition, which is by no means assured but is truly essential to global and U.S. security, remain to be identified. You could divide it up based on supply chains and who benefits from which component.
HEEWON PARK: First, we have the manufacturing component. These are all the “ingredients” that go into making alternative proteins, like soybeans, sugars, amino acids, energy, land, and maybe animal stem cells and labs for cultivated meat. Gordon, Bateman, and Liz Specht explain.
NOAH GORDON: A shift toward alternative proteins would, of course, have a big impact on ranchers and farmers who raise animals or grow crops to sell as animal feed.
JON BATEMAN: A common phrase that I hear is the notion of a “just transition.” In the same way that we think about making sure that coal miners have a path to alternative employment in a post-fossil fuel world, we need to do the same thing for slaughterhouse workers, for example.
LIZ SPECHT: The inputs for alternative proteins will absolutely come from agriculture. So, farmers who are producing feedstocks and feed crops for animal agriculture today can absolutely and will have a role to play in the alternative protein sector. Alternative proteins do use these feedstocks more efficiently. So, you know, in terms of total volume of demand for those types of crops, if we're talking about kind of a large scale transition to alternative proteins, those volumes may be lower, but there's a lot of work going on to produce kind of more specialty versions or strains or grades of crops that would have optimized properties for use in alternative protein products.
HEEWON PARK: At the international level, there’s a bunch of other components in the alternative proteins supply chain beyond just manufacturing. Here’s Bateman again.
JON BATEMAN: There is the intellectual property that drives these innovations. There's the market fit in terms of adapting alternative protein products to different markets around the world. There will be a scramble to get the trade policy right, the patents right.
HEEWON PARK: It’s hard to predict exactly which countries will emerge on top in this transition. But some leaders and potential winners are starting to emerge.
JON BATEMAN: In many ways, the United States is the world's current leader in alternative proteins. We have many of the largest and most successful companies as far as plant-based meat production. And we also have several of the cutting-edge companies and university labs that are involved in the next generation of alternative proteins like cultivated and fermented meat. But there's plenty of competition in this space.
HEEWON PARK: Some of the other leaders are small countries with little arable land or fresh water, who have an interest in getting their food as efficiently as possible. Specht explains.
LIZ SPECHT: As of right now, Singapore and the U.S. are still the only countries that have actually approved cultivated meat for sale to the public. But we know that cultivated meat is under review in several other countries, including Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland, the U.K., most likely others as well.
HEEWON PARK: Of course, it seems intuitive that these leaders will fare well from a protein transition. But Bateman says this is complicated by the fact that a lot of these countries are both leaders in alternative proteins, and still quite wedded to traditional meat.
JON BATEMAN: The U.S. is simultaneously the leader in alternative proteins and one of the world's largest meat producers. And so different parts of the United States, different industries, different constituencies, different geographies have different things to gain and lose from an alternative protein transition.
HEEWON PARK: So for example, a protein transition might be great for certain companies and national security concerns like public health and food security, but at the same time, some individual regions heavily dependent on animal agribusiness might face difficult economic challenges. Here’s Gordon:
NOAH GORDON: The same goes for China. Since 2019, China has been the #1 meat importer in the world. It still produces most of its own pork and a lot of its own poultry and beef, but a decline in arable land has made it difficult for China to keep up with domestic demand for meat. Meat is clearly important for the country, and the government even has a strategic reserve of pork. At the same time, China is showing a lot of interest in alternative proteins. The government released a 5-year plan where they specifically pointed to cultivated meat and alternative proteins as priorities for promotion.
HEEWON PARK: And just as China processes most of the minerals the world needs for solar panels and batteries, it’s also a leading processor of alternative protein ingredients. Specht says Beijing is well-positioned to benefit from a protein transition.
LIZ SPECHT: China is a major global processor for a lot of the ingredients and raw materials that go into alternative proteins. Much to the chagrin of a lot of alt protein companies that are trying to buy ingredients, they often are growing peas in, say, Canada and then shipping them to China to get pea protein isolates and then shipping them back, say, to the U.S. for producing end products. So China is already a huge powerhouse in terms of the raw materials. They've got a lot of manufacturing capacity in terms of fermentation capacity. So they really are well poised to make a fast shift in this direction.
HEEWON PARK: These competing interests are very present in the case of Brazil, too. In 2022, Brazil exported nearly 3 million tons of beef, more than any other country in the world. This makes beef production a huge chunk of Brazil’s economy. Gordon says that on the one hand:
NOAH GORDON: It’s easy to imagine a protein transition really hurting Brazil’s economy, given how wedded it is to beef production and exports. You might call it a ‘carnostate’. But even here, in a country so dependent on meat, you can see some enthusiasm and interest in alternative protein development.
HEEWON PARK: In fact, Specht says Brazil has the potential to remain a protein powerhouse.
LIZ SPECHT: There's some activity certainly going on in Brazil. One, of course, they're home to many of the world's largest meat companies that have an enormous presence there. But those meat companies also have stated interest in alternative proteins and actually are acting quite deliberately on that interest. JBS, for example, has launched a cultivated meat research center. There's meat companies in Brazil that have pretty well fleshed-out product lines in the plant-based meat space.
HEEWON PARK: Meat producers, of course, have a lot at stake in the conventional meat production system. But Specht notes that they are also aware of the vulnerabilities of this system.
LIZ SPECHT: From a meat manufacturer’s perspective, there are a lot of reasons that alternative protein production is more attractive, simply from the perspective of resiliency, lack of vulnerability to things like disease or slaughterhouse shutdowns or some of the challenges that we saw emerge during COVID, for instance, where there was really discontinuous labor supply and market demand. A lot of meat companies are really eager to have a more diversified portfolio of products. And that's exactly how a lot of meat companies are framing their interest in alternative proteins–as protein diversification to make them a more resilient company.
HEEWON PARK: Alternative proteins offer plenty of benefits to our national security interests. They’re an avenue for increased food security, fighting disease, and even strategic competition in arenas like critical technology. But perhaps more importantly, they offer a path forward and a change in our current system of destructive animal agriculture and factory farming. In this, Bateman finds some hope.
JON BATEMAN: It's the system that we have. It's not the system that anyone should want or really does want. People eat meat today despite how it's produced, not because of how it's produced. And there's virtually no rational defense for contemporary factory farming. So policymakers and consumers everywhere should hope for a world in which we can fill the same consumer needs, but in ways that are less environmentally destructive, less costly to human health and well-being, and societies around the world. That's a great world that we should all want, and alternative proteins provide perhaps the best pathway toward getting there, although nothing is assured.
HEEWON PARK: And with that, we've reached the last episode of Barbecue Earth. Thank you so much for listening, and if you liked the show, please rate and review Barbecue Earth on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’ve been listening to Barbecue Earth.
— — —
HEEWON PARK: This episode was written by Noah Gordon and me, Heewon Park, and produced by me with assistance from Emily Hardy, Daniel Helmeci, Tim Martin, and Zachary Mills. Music was composed by me and artists on Artlist. Thank you to Emily Hardy and Daniel Helmeci for research support, Ryan DeVries for fact checking, and Amy Mellon, Jocelyn Soly, and Amanda Branom for their graphic design work.
AUDIO (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Advertisement):
You have been listening to an audio production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Views expressed are those of the host and guest panelists, and not necessarily those of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Subscribe to Carnegie podcasts on popular podcast platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at carnegieendowment.org.
