Plant-based alternatives to beef have the potential to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but their growth in popularity could disrupt the agricultural workforce, threatening more than 1.5 million industry jobs, new economic models show.
This research, published Aug. 3 by Cornell, Johns Hopkins University and international partners in Lancet Planet Health, suggests that policymakers should be vigilant and ready to mitigate negative consequences of technological disruption.
By embracing meat protein alternatives, U.S. food production could reduce its agricultural carbon footprint by between 2.5% and 13.5%, mostly by decreasing the number of cows needed for beef production by two to 12 million, according to the paper.
“A reduced carbon footprint and increased food system resource-use efficiency are reasons alternative proteins could be in a portfolio of technologies and policies to promote more-sustainable food systems,” said lead author Daniel Mason-D’Croz, senior research associate, Department of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
“Still, plant-based alternatives to beef are not silver bullets,” he said, “with their impact on other environmental dimensions of the food system – such as total water use – ambiguous.”
The researchers explored the potential disruption of plant-based beef alternatives by comparing the economic consequences under a range of scenarios, where plant-based beef alternatives replaced 10%, 30%…
