The latest United Nations report on the state of the world’s environment recommends taxing consumers who buy foods associated with higher greenhouse gas emissions and increasing agricultural production on land where it is most environmentally efficient.

Deep changes are needed because “the food system, in response to growing and changing consumer demand, is increasing pressure on local ecosystems and on the global climate”, the UN’s sixth Global Environment Outlook warns. To address this, it encourages moving subsidies away from production or inputs such as fertiliser, to pay farmers to reduce pollution such as greenhouse gas emissions instead. The trend in the EU to pay farmers increasingly for proven environmental results is seen as positive, while the current greening scheme is criticised.

The second priority should be to tackle food waste, which accounts for one-third of global agricultural production. Finally, the UN encourages healthier and more sustainable diets. One solution could be “an emissions tax on foods at the point of consumption”. This would mean that foods derived from livestock, which account for 77% of agricultural land use in the world, would carry a higher tax. “Nonetheless, consumption taxes do not need to be blunt instruments, with blanket rates applied indiscriminately across a product category,” the authors wrote.

Differentiation

Such a tax – though never tried by any country – should differentiate between individual products, the UN suggested. For example, consumers would pay a higher tax on beef than on beans, but they would also pay a lower tax on Irish beef than on a Brazilian equivalent. If applied widely around the world, the UN estimates that such a tax could reduce greenhouse gases by 50 times Ireland’s farming emissions “and result in net health benefits at the global level due to reduced consumption of meat”.

Whatever food is produced and consumed, the UN highlights the need to increase yields from existing farmland to feed a growing population, while managing this intensification carefully to avoid environmental degradation.

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