Meat tax - why chickens pay the price (Animal Ask)

A meat tax is one policy that can reduce meat consumption. This policy has some key advantages: there is strong economic evidence that such a tax would reduce meat consumption while, depending on the type of meat tax, a campaign could also take advantage of the momentum provided by the environmental and health movements.

However, a meat tax also suffers from a substantial risk. As the price of meat increases, consumers may switch from eating beef to instead eating chicken and fish. This could cause an overall increase in the total number of animals killed for food each year. This risk is highly plausible, considering that environmental- and health-motivated policies would likely place higher taxes on beef than chicken or fish. This risk is also difficult to predict in advance, even if the details of the meat tax policy were known. Furthermore, public support for a meat tax is very low.

For these reasons, we do not recommend a meat tax as a campaign for animal advocacy organisations. Instead, we encourage organisations to choose an alternative campaign that has a more robust and favourable base of evidence.