This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The Australian government has a vested interest in ensuring the country’s consumption of meat remains the highest in the world, even to the detriment of the population, a US lawyer has said.

David Robinson Simon, a Californian attorney and author, has argued that meat and dairy producers in the US and, increasingly, Australia, are teaming with governments to encourage people to consume more animal products than they otherwise would.

In his book Meatonomics, he laid out the part played by subsidies, legislation and regulation in the provision of meat, eggs and dairy at the prices and in the quantities that consumers had become accustomed to.

“This triple whammy of messaging, legislation and price control ... deprives consumers of the ability to make informed and independent decisions of what and how much to eat,” he said in a guest lecture organised by the the not-for-profit Voiceless animal protection institute at the University of Sydney on Thursday night.

Australian producers were implementing many of the same strategies, he said, pointing to the “aggressive messaging” of industry bodies such as Meat and Livestock Australia, funded by a levy collected from livestock producers on the sale of stock by the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources.

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In the US, a similar “checkoff” was imposed on cattle imports and sales to fund promotion and marketing of beef and beef products.

“Both in the US and Australia, our federal governments are engaged in a campaign to support industry and bombard us with messages to get us to consume more meat, eggs and dairy,” Simon said.

“We can say without controversy or doubt that when a checkoff program speaks in the US – when it says drink more milk, eat more beef – that is the federal government of our country telling consumers to eat more animal foods.”

He said the same forces were at work in Australia, where industry had influence over standard-setting, and legislation decriminalised abuse of factory-raised animals and insulated the producers from scrutiny and liability.

A spokesman for MLA said that it was a producer-owned, not-for-profit organisation that delivered marketing activities on behalf of the Australian red meat industry, “ultimately delivering improved profitability to those farmers”.

MLA used producer levies to fund research and development “to ensure we improve productivity” across the whole value chain – from farm through processing to retail, he said.

The legal counsel for Voiceless, Sarah Margo, said every federal animal welfare initiative had been dismantled by the Abbott government. It had withdrawn funding for the Australian animal welfare strategy, disbanded its advisory committee and dissolved an animal welfare subdivision within the Department of Agriculture.



Plans for an independent inspector-general of animal welfare and live export had been abandoned, along with those for the improved animal welfare program in 2013.

Margo said the Australian framework to protect animal welfare was failing under the management of Department of Agriculture, which was also tasked with maximising output.

Of the 15 research and development corporations through which the Australian government and primary producers co-funded research “for industry and community benefits”, 10 were industry-owned companies, including Meat and Livestock Australia.



This effectively meant research “was prepared by industry, for industry, with the use of industry-funded science”, Margo said. The MLA spokesman said much of the research it funded was focused on improving animal welfare across the industry, as well as productivity.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Agriculture said the government did not fund marketing. This, said Simon, was a “red herring” since the government did fund research and development: “a distinction that strikes me as relatively academic.”

But Margo said there was cause to be optimistic when the Productivity Commission had recognised this perceived “conflict of interest ... [and] disproportionate industry influence” in its recent inquiry into regulation of Australian agriculture.

In a report sent to government in November 2016 and made public in March, the commission recommended that an independent body, the Australian Commission for Animal Welfare, be established to manage the development of farm animal regulation.

According to current OECD figures, the average Australian eats about 93kg of meat each year – three times the global average.



This came with a cost, said Simon, noting Australia’s high cancer rates. The World Health Organisation’s IARC cancer research organisation had classified processed beef a group-one carcinogen.

“That’s in the same category as asbestos,” he said.

In April last year, Meat and Livestock Australia reported that its You’re Better on Beef campaign had succeeding in reducing the number of “mothers limiting red meat consumption due to health concerns ... by 20% to only 23%”.

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But those health concerns were justified, Simon said.

“One must ask the question: is it appropriate for the government to be pushing meat when it’s certainly not telling people expose yourself to asbestos, coal fibre or other carcinogens?

“I’ll have to leave that as a rhetorical question. I think the answer is obvious. If you feel a sense of outrage, I suggest you talk to your MP.”

The MLA spokesman said the MLA strongly promoted eating red meat as part of a balanced diet, consistent with dietary guidelines developed by the National Health and Medical Research Council, a standalone government agency.

He also disputed the IARC classification of processed meat.

Simon proposes not only eliminating government subsidies on animal food products, but introducing a tax on them to reduce consumption and restore a “state of equilibrium to the market”.



He said there was growing support for such a measure, “for the social reasons we saw with tobacco and other undesirables”, and that he expected the medical profession in a “smaller, more progressive” jurisdiction such as Denmark, Sweden or California to take the lead.

After appearances in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney, Simon is due to speak in Hobart, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra next week.