UK activists campaign to switch animal farms into micro-organism tanks

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: The Guardian
12 Nov 2022 12:13

UK-based organization Replanet's manifesto calls for a reduction in animal protein in diets as livestock farming accounts for at least 16.5% of the planet’s greenhouse gases.

Cellular agriculture would enable the production of genuine animal proteins through microbial precision fermentation.

UK-based organization Replanet issued today its 'Reboot Food' manifesto that outlines a radical plan to reduce the environmental impacts and improve the resilience of the global food system, The Guardian reported on Saturday.

According to the campaigners, it is possible to produce enough protein to feed all living humans if the world's farmlands are switched to factories producing micro-organisms in a land area that is smaller than about the size of London.

The manifesto called for a reduction in animal protein in our diets as livestock farming accounts for at least 16.5% of the planet’s greenhouse gases.

In 2021, British businessman and cookery writer Henry Dimbleby suggested in the government's National Food Strategy (NFS) that people reduce their meat consumption by 30% over the next decade to meet government targets on health, climate, and the environment.

In the report, Dimbleby stated, "Careful livestock farming can be a boon to the environment, but our current appetite for meat is unsustainable: 85% of farmland is used to feed livestock. We need some of that land back."

The COP27 climate summit kicked off on November 6 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, with a surge of vegan activists fervently contesting animal agriculture due to its harmful effects on the environment.

Activist climate activist Mark Lynas said, "The mainstream environmental movement’s agricultural policies are making things worse not better. Organic and ‘regenerative’ farming methods encourage agricultural sprawl and have become smokescreens for the livestock industry. It’s time for sensible environmentalists to unite behind food production techniques that use less land, not more."

Precision fermentation allows us to move from farming macroorganisms (cows, sheep) to farming microorganisms (yeasts & bacteria). Using genetics, we can programme these microorganisms to produce exactly the same proteins & fats powered by clean energy from solar, wind & nuclear. pic.twitter.com/j0IBXO1pzT
— RePlanet (@letsreplanet) November 12, 2022

During the COP27 conference, campaigners demanded world leaders implement 10 policies, including investing 2.5% of GDP over 10 years into food innovation, ending all subsidies for animal agriculture and subsidizing plant-based foods instead, banning the advertising of carbon-intensive meat, limiting patents on new food technology and legalizing gene-editing.

The central idea is to switch to a technology called "precision fermentation," which involves brewing yeasts and bacteria to make proteins biologically identical to animal proteins using genetically engineered micro-organisms fermented in tanks.

Besides that, these would be easily powered by solar, wind, and nuclear energy, campaigners pointed out that the technology is responsible for producing 99% of insulin and 80% of rennet worldwide.

The manifesto states that "protein from precision fermentation is up to 40,900 times more land efficient than beef, making it technically feasible to produce the world’s protein on an area of land smaller than Greater London."

Some methods of precision fermentation are already in use in the US, where some companies are employing the technique to reproduce the milk proteins responsible for the fatty, tangy taste in ice cream.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot said, "The elephant in the room at Cop27 is the cow. But thankfully this time, there really is a recipe for success. By rebooting our food systems with precision fermentation we can phase out animal agriculture while greatly increasing the amount of protein available for human consumption."

While attending the COP27 conference on November 7, campaigners said they were disturbed to discover that the Human Rights Watch website is blocked on COP27’s official wi-fi and on Egyptian mobile data and called on world leaders to condemn Egypt's human rights violations.

We're disturbed to discover that the Human Rights Watch website is blocked on COP27’s official WiFi & on Egyptian mobile data.

We're cross posting the @hrw country report on Egypt & report on the torture of LGBT people. Please read and share!https://t.co/gMZumei2Xq pic.twitter.com/A48lZ2JmA2
— RePlanet (@letsreplanet) November 7, 2022