Tensions just days before climate summit: Argentina and Brazil seek to remove assessment favoring plant-based diets

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A few days before the start of the Climate Summit (COP26) in Glasgow, where leaders will discuss new measures to combat global warming, the draft of the assessment of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been leaked, revealing that several countries, including Argentina and Brazil, are trying to adapt the report to their particular needs, as it threatens their economic bases.

Fossil fuel producers such as Australia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are lobbying the IPCC to delete or weaken a critical finding that the world must rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

Saudi Arabia, which along with OPEC produces about 40 percent of the world’s oil, is repeatedly trying to get the report’s authors to delete references to the need to phase out fossil fuels, as well as an IPCC conclusion that “urgent and accelerated action is needed to mitigate climate change at all levels.”

PLANT-BASED DIETS

On the other hand, Brazil and Argentina have urged that messages about the climate benefits of “plant-based” diets and limiting meat and dairy consumption be removed. IPCC authors can reject proposed changes to their drafts if the comments are not supported by the scientific literature.

In addition, “Argentina is pushing for several new deletions, including references to red meat taxes and even the international ‘Meatless Monday’ campaign, which encourages people to go vegetarian one day a week, because these are ‘biased concepts,'” the published article states.

In the half-decade since the Paris Agreement came into force, the climate impact of animal agriculture has come under increasing scrutiny. Several influential reports have advocated a switch to plant-based proteins.

The report also cites Argentina’s Secretary for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Innovation, Rodrigo Rodriguez Tornquist, who also “calls for the complete deletion of this paragraph from the report, stating that there is “no scientific basis for such a claim about plant-based protein diets” and no “multilateral consensus” on such ideas at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In addition, the release from Greenpeace’s U.K. reporting team states that “Brazil, where agriculture-induced deforestation in the Amazon is dramatically increasing under agri-industrialist President Jair Bolsonaro, has sought to prevent the IPCC from making a direct link between meat consumption and global warming in its landmark climate change report.”

Brazil also calls for the complete deletion of sentences in the same section that read, “Diets low in meat and milk are already widespread and increasing in acceptance in many countries and cultures, while elsewhere they are still low. A plant-based diet can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50% compared to the average emissions-intensive Western diet.”

As justification for the proposed deletions, the Brazilian reviewer writes, “It cannot be assumed that plant-based diets and healthy diets are the same things, that both have a low environmental impact, or that sustainable diets are healthy.”