The Beef Against . . . Beef

By J. MADELEINE NASH

VERMIN. THE WORD reminds most people of cockroaches scuttling across kitchen floors and rats skulking in dark basement corners. But to Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental movement's most prominent polemicist, vermin are big, brown-eyed ungulates that graze the rolling countryside, chew their cud and moo. In his controversial new book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In sub- Saharan Africa, cattle are contributing to desertification by denuding arid lands of fragile vegetation. In Central and South America, ranchers are felling tropical rain forests and turning them into pastures for their voracious herds. "The average cow," claims Rifkin, "eats its way through 900 lbs. of vegetation every month. It is literally a hoofed locust."

According to Rifkin, civilization began a long slide downhill when 18th century British gentry acquired a taste for fat-marbled beef and proceeded to spread that proclivity, like a plague, throughout the Western world. Rifkin's real argument, of course, is not with the 1.3 billion bovines that roam the planet but with modern methods of mass-producing beef that include plumping animals with hormones and stuffing them with "enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people." Although he did not personally visit a ranch or a meat-packing plant, his stomach-churning descriptions of how cattle are treated from birth to slaughter brim with righteous indignation. (A reformed carnivore, Rifkin says he swore off beef 15 years ago after taking three bites of a revolting blue-gray hamburger, then throwing the rest away.)

Such inflammatory rhetoric sends shudders through the U.S. beef industry, which is already reeling from a nearly one-third drop in per capita consumption since 1976 -- the result of popular concern about fat in the diet. Now Rifkin hungers for a more decisive blow. This week he is leading a coalition of environmental, food-policy and animal-rights groups in launching a well-financed advertising campaign aimed at slashing worldwide beef consumption by 50% over the coming decade. Members of the coalition range from the Rainforest Action Network, which blames cattle for "killing the Amazon," % to the Fund for Animals, which criticizes the use of poisons and traps to control coyotes that prey on calves. The International Rivers Network blames cattle for wasting scarce water resources, while Food First denounces the feedlot system for wasting grain that could otherwise be used for human consumption.

Not since he took on the biotechnology industry over the safety of genetic engineering has Rifkin been embroiled in a higher-profile controversy, or one with the potential for greater economic consequences. With so much at stake, it is hardly surprising that environmentalists and meat-industry advocates have locked horns over Rifkin's charges. Among the most notable areas of dispute:

Cattle ranching is destroying tropical forests. Without question, ranching is a factor in tropical deforestation, and a major one at that. But University of Pennsylvania biologist Daniel Janzen, for one, believes that this unfortunate epoch in the history of Latin America is rapidly drawing to a close. In Costa Rica, he says, "most of the pastureland that was easily cleared of forest has already been cleared." At the same time, the remaining forest has begun to rise in value. "Two decades ago," explains Janzen, "the choice was simple. Either the forest stood there, or someone tore it down to plant a crop." Now leaders of countries like Costa Rica are beginning to view forests as valuable assets that can help control erosion, protect watersheds and generate income from New Age industries like biotechnology and ecotourism.

Cows are contributing to global warming. To a measurable extent, they are. The symbiotic bacteria that dwell in every cow's gut enable grazers to break down the cellulose in grass. As a by-product, these bacteria produce considerable amounts of methane, which, like carbon dioxide, is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. The methane periodically gusts forth from grazing herds in the form of rumbling postprandial belches. But if cattle contribute to the global methane load, they are hardly alone. Swamps, termite mounds and rice paddies are all hosts to similar sorts of bacterial methane factories.

Overgrazing by cattle has destroyed grasslands. The "cowburnt" ranges of the American West testify to the damage wrought by decades of uncontrolled grazing, which transformed once verdant land into desert. Of more than 50 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land that is open to grazing, half remains in poor condition. Lands under control of the Bureau of Land Management are in equally bad shape. Driving the cattle off, however, as some radical environmentalists would like, is not necessarily the solution. Properly managed grazing, range ecologists agree, serves to enrich rather than impoverish grasslands. In exchange for forage, hoofed beasts deposit tons of that old-fashioned organic fertilizer known as manure.

Grain fed to cattle could feed the hungry. "Hunger isn't about actual scarcity," declares Stephanie Rosenfeld, a researcher for San Francisco-based Food First. "It's about the maldistribution of resources. People are hungry for different reasons at different times, but quite often the reasons have to do with beef." The link is often very subtle: in countries like Egypt and Mexico, for instance, farmland that formerly grew staples for human consumption is being switched to grow grain for beef that only the wealthy can afford. Indirectly, then, a growing cattle population threatens humans on the low end of the economic scale with hunger. D. Gale Johnson, an agricultural economist at the University of Chicago, questions this assumption. He notes that in China, beef consumption has risen in tandem with overall improvements in diet.

Rifkin's critics -- and there are many -- regularly accuse him of taking a nugget of truth and enlarging it beyond reason in ways calculated to raise public fears. "Beyond Beef is about the worst book I've ever read," exclaims Dennis Avery, director of Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Indianapolis. "It establishes Rifkin as the Stephen King of food horror stories." Among other things, Rifkin raises the specter of beef contaminated with viruses, including a bovine immunodeficiency virus that he provocatively labels "COW AIDS," though there is no evidence that the virus can infect humans. Rifkin also charges that inspection of carcasses is shoddy, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture flatly denies. However, even the American Meat Institute allows that the inspection system, which still relies on visually examining and touching meat, hasn't changed much since 1906 and needs more up-to-date techniques to detect invisible contaminants like microbes. Ironically, the primary tools for improvement could well come from biotechnology, an industry that Rifkin loves to bash.

Rifkin is using beef as a metaphor for all that has gone rotten in the modern world, wrongs that he attributes to a metaphysical loss of humans' | sacred relationship to nature. And cattle, because of their prominent role in ancient mythology and their haunting presence in prehistoric pictographs, lend themselves well to this moralistic exercise.

But how much blame for environmental degradation should the cattle industry rightly shoulder? In the Netherlands, for instance, manure from pigs poses a major ecological threat, defiling water supplies with excessive nitrates and acidifying local soils. Sheep have permanently scarred the landscape in Spain and Portugal, while in India -- a country that Rifkin praises for its kindness to cows -- bovines are ravenous wraiths whose constant quest for food drives them to ravage standing forests. Holy or not, most of India's 200 million cows go hungry much of the time.

Cutting down on beef consumption in protein-sated countries like the U.S. is a prudent prescription that would go a long way toward enhancing general health. Red meat is the primary source of saturated fat in the American diet, and too much dietary fat has been linked to the development of both heart disease and certain types of cancer. But trimming beef in the American diet, emphasizes Felicia Busch of the American Dietetic Association, "will not solve world hunger, and it isn't going to save our planet." The environmental cost of beef is just one aspect of the multiplying burdens of producing food for an exploding human population. The real threat to the carrying capacity of planet Earth, dear Jeremy, comes not from our cattle but from ourselves.

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CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Water Education Foundation}][TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Cicerone & Oremland, Biogeochemical Aspects of Atmospheric Methane}][TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: M.E. Ensminger, Animal Science}]CAPTION: COSTLY CATTLE

With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/New York and David S. Jackson/San Francisco