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A new land dividend (Green Alliance)

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Summary

“There is simply not enough land to continue current patterns of food consumption and meet our new goals for land.”

Europe faces a land crunch. It has almost no productive land unused by people and it substantially relies on land outside Europe. But more land is needed to achieve Europe’s carbon neutrality and nature goals, to expand the area of nature-friendly agriculture and generate energy.

There is simply not enough land to continue current patterns of food consumption and meet our new goals for land. But talking about what we eat in Europe remains taboo: for politicians, diet change is a bitter pill to swallow.

Alternative proteins can help to avoid this stalemate. They could taste the same as meat and dairy with radically lower costs to consumers and the environment. Today’s plant-based alternative proteins are already beginning to displace processed meat and dairy products as they reach cost parity. Our analysis suggests that, even with very limited support, they could displace a sixth of European meat and dairy consumption by 2050.

With the right policy support, products created by precision fermentation or cultivated meat could replicate some cuts of meat and more complex cheeses. This could enable alternative proteins to displace two thirds of the animal products currently consumed across Europe. If this were the case, alternative proteins could displace Europe’s land crunch with an enormous land dividend. Reducing demand for meat and dairy by two thirds would mean 44 per cent of the farmland in the ten European countries we studied would no longer be needed for growing feed and grazing animals. Overseas land use would fall even further, by 57 per cent, releasing an area equivalent to Spain from producing the food that Europe imports.

The question is what could be done with this land dividend. Governments could use it to grow more food at home, increasing self-sufficiency; expand natural habitats that store carbon and support wild species; or increase the area of agroecological or high nature value farmland in Europe. Here, we show the implications of a ‘shared dividend’ policy, which does all three. (We explore other scenarios in our accompanying technical report).

In our ‘high innovation’ scenario, where alternative proteins come to represent two thirds of the meat and dairy market by 2050, sharing the land dividend would have four benefits:

  1. The ten European countries studied would become self-sufficient in food, in terms of net land use.
  2. Farmers would benefit from the carbon removal market by having the space to expand nature-rich, natural carbon sinks. These would avoid the need for engineered carbon removals, saving €21 billion a year by 2050 on the cost of meeting Europe’s carbon neutrality goals, equivalent to nearly half the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget.
  3. The area of agroecological farmland would quadruple by 2050, which is more than is necessary to meet the EU Farm to Fork strategy’s goal of 25 per cent of land being certified organic.
  4. Enough wildlife habitat would be created to restore so-called Annex I habitats (those identified as most in need of conservation) required by the EU’s Nature Restoration Law.

“The CAP must be reimagined as a new rural deal.”

To ensure the social benefits of this change are realised, the CAP must be reimagined as a new rural deal, one which pays farmers and land managers for nature restoration and carbon removal, alongside food. Alternative proteins would be central to this new rural deal, as they create the space to avoid the difficult trade-offs that Europe will otherwise face in reconciling its food, climate, nature and rural economic goals.

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