Including sustainability in dietary guidelines “massive overreach”: SSG Chair

The Australian Beef Sustainability Framework (ABSF) Sustainability Steering Group (SSG) Chair, Mark Davie, has condemned the move to insert sustainability criteria into Australia’s national dietary guidelines, labelling it “misguided overreach”.

The 2013 guidelines, developed by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), recommended Australians eat 455g of lean, cooked red meat per week as part of a healthy, balanced diet. However, during its background work to update the guidelines, the NHMRC has identified the need to update information on sustainable diets as a “high priority”, raising concerns among red meat producers and industry groups that it foreshadowed a move against eating red meat.

Mr Davie said the issue needs to be approached with extreme caution as the ABSF itself had found that credible data and metrics on the sustainability of red meat production were few and far between.

“What we don’t want to see in this review is the NHMRC captured by anti-meat ideology dressed up as scientific fact,” Mr Davie said.

“The ABSF has been monitoring the sustainability of red meat in Australia for almost a decade and is about to issue its eighth annual report on the performance of the industry. One of our challenges over that time has been finding metrics that accurately capture that performance and we recognise there is still so much work to do to get a complete picture.

“For example, we are still not measuring, at a national scale, the amount of carbon sequestered on Australian farms. How will the national dietary guidelines treat that issue when carbon emissions are so fundamental to sustainability?”

Mr Davie pointed to the increasing number of beef operations that have attained carbon neutrality, the ongoing reduction in emissions of the industry, and the record number of Australian Carbon Credit Units awarded to Queensland beef producers Bonnie Doone Beef.

“The red meat industry has outperformed the wider economy in emissions reduction since 2005, cutting them by more than 64%, and has set a goal of carbon neutrality by 2030,” Mr Davie said.

“That is a more ambitious target than the wider economy goal of net zero by 2050.”

Mr Davie said the NHMRC would need to anticipate the impact of the Federal Government’s planned Nature Repair Market, while factoring in complex considerations such as natural capital and ecosystem services.

“And what is so often overlooked in these discussions on sustainability is the economic sustainability of our regional communities,” he said.

“Nine in every ten employees of the red meat industry live in rural and regional areas.

“To look at the sustainability of the red meat industry and only see the methane emissions of cattle would be reductionist in the extreme.”

Mr Davie suggested an area where the NHMRC could have a positive impact is informing consumers about the need to reduce food waste.

“If food waste was a country, it would be would the third largest carbon emitter in the world,” he said.

“But the highest priority for the NHMRC ought to be the nutritional requirements of human beings.

“This should not be a controversial thing to say - the NHMRC needs to develop guidelines that provide easy-to-understand advice on eating a healthy, balanced diet. If science is a guide, then the advice will recognise the well-established nutritional benefits of eating red meat.”