‘Cattle cause most global warming’

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New York, Nov 30: Who is contributing most to global warming? Dumb cattle and not emissions from factories and power plants, says the United Nations.

The increasing world population, a new UN report warns, would lead to further increase in the number of livestock as demand for meat and milk increases and that would mean emission of more greenhouse gases.

Not only that. Cattle are also a major contributor to land degradation and pollution of water, the report says.

The livestock business, the report says, is among the most damaging sectors to the earth's increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.

Stressing that cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, the UN has called for improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions.

Beyond improving animal diets, proposed remedies to the multiple problems include soil conservation methods together with controlled livestock exclusion from sensitive areas; setting up biogas plant initiatives to recycle manure; improving efficiency of irrigation systems; and introducing full-cost pricing for water together with taxes to discourage large-scale livestock concentration close to cities.

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems," senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said on Wednesday.

Cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation, says a new report released by FAO of which Steinfeld is senior author.