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Surprise surprise! The Agricultural and Food Industry, according countless number of scientific journals, is a driver to the exploitation of natural resources, environmental degradation and release of greenhouse gas emission. This is hardly shocking at all and here’s why.

The impact of agriculture has long affected the natural environment and this could be traced back to as far as 8000 years ago during the Neolithic period. At the time, the agricultural revolution was already altering the environments on earth significantly. Large areas of forest were being felled and burnt to improve agricultural land. It is said that this led to an overall increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which contributed to small but sustained elevated global temperatures (Ruddiman, 2003). In addition, around 3000 years ago, the cultivation of rice in paddy field in southeast Asia contributed to a rise in methane concentration globally. Furthermore, Ruddiman (2013) suggested that the farming practices may have delayed the onset of the ice age and this is the first time this has happen in 3 million years (Fig1)!

The impacts described above pale in comparison to the impacts during and after the industrial revolution however. The onset of industrial revolution and associated exploitation of fossil fuel allowed the nitrogen in the air to be converted and utilised as fertiliser for the first time. What came after was the rapid expansion of agricultural productivity. In the post WW2 era, the Europe Union Heavily subsidised the agricultural sector. There were intense land use and application of fertiliser. The negative ramification in this period not only includes the rise in greenhouse gas globally, but also regional impacts such as eutrophication, alteration of biogeochemical flow (e.g. phosphorus and nitrogen) and decline in biodiversity (Steffen et al 2015).

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) stated that the agricultural land takes up around 40% of the world's land area in 2011. In the Amazon region 17% of the forested area has been cleared at the expense of cattle ranching in the from 1960s onwards.  The intensification of agricultural practices has led to both global and regional impacts. For example, the ammonia caused by intensive livestock rearing has led to local impacts such as eutrophication of aquatic and terrestrial environment and global impacts such as disruption of nitrogen cycle and microbiological processes. This adds onto the hotly debated topic of whether we have departed from the Holocene and entered the epoch of Anthropocene.

According to Stenfeld et al (2006), the global meat production itself accounts for up to a quarter of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, roughly 6 x 10⁹ t year-1 of GHGs as CO2-equivalents, contributing further to climate change. The emissions begin at the minute when fossil fuel is used for the clearance of forest, production of fertiliser and transportation of food, not to mention the manufacturing and packaging side of food processing. The list goes on.

There is no doubt that the anthropogenic impact of agriculture and food production has had significant impact on the environment. One might think we are basically all doomed. There seems to be no escape to our inevitable self-destruction as we continue in a business-as-usual manner. Perhaps there is still a glimpse of hope that we could mitigate or perhaps reverse such worsening trends, despite the growing population and rising proportion of middle class in the developing countries. 

It is the goal of the blog to examine such possibilities through the exploration of the rise of veganism. I will seek to explain both the local and global impacts of this trend on the environment and discuss what the future holds for us and what we, as individuals, could do to help mitigate the environmental damage caused by agricultural activities.