Meat and dairy wars: how Net Zero will squeeze British farmers and families

Last week, Ed Miliband confirmed to Parliament that the government will accept the envelope target for the Seventh Carbon Budget. This means that the UK will be required to limit emissions between 2038 and 2042 to 535 MtCO2e, putting emissions in 2040 around 87% below 1990 levels.

Legislation is still required and Ministers are yet to explain how they intend to meet their overall target. Miliband has said plans will be published “in due course”.

The Seventh Carbon Budget sounds incredibly technocratic, but this is not just another emissions accounting exercise. It marks the point at which Net Zero moves deeper into the physical foundations of everyday life. Earlier phases of decarbonisation focused mainly on electricity, industry and elements of transport. 

Net Zero now demands lower agricultural emissions and a major change in how land is used. In practice, that means farming, food production and diet are about to become central political questions.

Until now, the UK’s emissions reduction programme has barely touched agriculture and land use. Emissions from the sector have fallen by only around 5% over the past fifteen years. Yet the legally binding climate framework now requires a far faster pace of reduction if Britain is to remain on track. 

That is why food is the next front in the Net Zero project.

The difficulty is that food is not like other sectors. An internal combustion engine can, despite range and cost issues, be replaced by an electric vehicle. Similar arguments can also be made about heat pumps and boilers. But food is not merely a technology platform. It is biological, cultural and social. It depends on land, animals, taste, habit and tradition. People do not consume food as they consume appliances. They eat within families, cultures and friends.

That makes agriculture an unusually hard target for climate policy.

Certainly, some reductions can come from lower-carbon practices. Farmers can use fertiliser more efficiently. They can manage soils differently. They can improve animal health, breeding and manure management. Machinery can be decarbonised over time. These changes matter. But, as the CCC makes clear in CB7, they are not enough to deliver the scale of emissions reductions required by the Net Zero pathway.

The central problem is livestock. Cattle and sheep produce methane. Manure produces emissions. Grassland and feed production use land that climate planners increasingly want for other purposes. If the state wants lower agricultural emissions and more land for trees, peatland restoration, bioenergy crops and other carbon saving uses, it cannot avoid the livestock question.

The logic is simple. Lower agricultural emissions and land use change ultimately require fewer livestock. Reduced livestock headcounts mean lower meat and dairy demand if prices and imports are not to rise. [Or they mean higher prices and thus lower demand]

According to the CCC’s Balanced Pathway scenario, the preferred route to Net Zero, average meat consumption falls by 25% by 2040 and 35% by 2050 compared with 2019 levels. Dairy consumption falls by 20% by 2035 and then remains at that lower level. Cattle and sheep numbers fall by 27% by 2040 and 38% by 2050.

This is not an overnight ban on meat or dairy. It is a state-led contraction in consumption, livestock numbers and the agricultural land footprint. The process has to begin well before the Seventh Carbon Budget period. By 2030, the CCC assumes meat consumption is already 11% lower, dairy consumption 12% lower, and cattle and sheep numbers 8% lower.

But the CCC’s model depends on demand falling first. Consumers are expected to eat less meat and dairy, and to substitute some of it with lower carbon foods entirely of their own volition. Livestock numbers then fall. Land is then released. That land can then be used for woodland, peatland restoration, agroforestry, energy crops and other climate related purposes.

By targeting agriculture, the CCC deliberately creates the same kind of trilemma that Net Zero has already created in energy and resulted in the highest industrial power prices in the developed world.  

But for food and farming, it wants domestic food security, lower agricultural emissions and more land for carbon storage. As with energy, those objectives pull against each other. The CCC’s answer is to essentially redefine the food security problem. Rather than asking how Britain can maintain current levels of livestock production, the model asks how Britain can maintain domestic supply once consumers have been pushed towards eating less meat and dairy.

In other words, it preserves food security on paper by assuming away the demand that the current livestock sector exists to meet.

That is a large assumption. Meat and dairy demand may, in theory, be responsive to price, availability and substitutes such as plant-based “milks” or “novel alternative proteins” (plant-based analogues, insects or meat grown in laboratories), but it is also culturally very sticky. Meat and dairy are embedded in family life, traditional diets, social habits and personal preference. If you read Jack Drummond’s The Englishman’s Food (1939), a history of the English diet over five centuries, you can see how embedded beef and lamb are in our national diet. As the 16th-century poet William Forrest writes (translation from early modern English):

Our English nature cannot live by roots, water, herbs, or such beggarly fare, which may serve for vile foreign peasants; Englishmen need meat according to their ancient custom, beef, mutton and veal, to sustain their courage.

But what if demand does not fall? Squeezing domestic livestock production while people still want meat and dairy will inevitably push prices up. Retailers and hospitality will look abroad for supply. Imports will rise. British farmers will lose market share. Consumers will pay more. Emissions will simply be moved overseas.

As with the offshoring of manufacturing, such an approach would be unfair on farmers and consumers. It would also defeat the purpose of the policy.

The CCC understands this risk. If Britain cuts domestic production but imports more high-carbon meat and dairy, the emissions accounting begins to look absurd. A carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) is therefore offered as a potential answer:

Policy must protect against risks of carbon leakage from agricultural imports. In the Balanced Pathway, a reduction in demand for meat and dairy in the UK avoids imports of these products increasing. Our analysis maintains the self-sufficiency ratio of UK food consumption met by UK production. Carbon border adjustment mechanisms may also be needed.

Indeed, from 1 January 2027, in the case of fertiliser, a CBAM already is.

But this will also make food more expensive. So would a so-called “meat tax” or other carbon levies. In a country already battered by food price inflation, that is politically toxic. Research by More in Common for Octopus shows that high energy bills are already destabilising our domestic politics.

If direct measures prove too difficult, Ministers may look for adjacent pressures instead. The Government is already using environmental permitting and water pollution rules. Higher wage costs and new employment laws are putting further pressure on hospitality venues and struggling small abattoirs, both of which are critical to the carcase balance - meaning the ability to sell the whole animal - not just the prime cuts, across different parts of the food supply chain. Elsewhere, new procurement standards, retailer pressure, labelling, planning rules and farm support schemes could all be used to make livestock production progressively harder. The instrument would be indirect and not badged as part of Net Zero, but the effect would be the same.

Finally, there is an obvious culture-war route. If the public resists the shift away from meat and dairy, Ministers and campaigners may seek to portray opposition as ignorance, populism or vested-interest lobbying, rather than a legitimate defence of food culture, farming and household choice. None of this is fanciful. A recent BBC News item on French Asterix-style banquets, which celebrate traditional French food, reported the movement as part of a secret far-right plot to promote white nationalism. Coverage of this kind has the effect of weakening public support for the wider traditional culture that sustains the production and consumption of meat and dairy.

Moreover, organisations such as the Behavioural Insights Team have already argued that the media and information campaigns can be used to redefine traditional diets and promote non-Anglo and non-Northern European diets with higher levels of plant-based foods.

As a child, I was always taught never to discuss politics at the dinner table. But whether we like it or not, Net Zero is moving into the food we eat, the farms that produce it and the countryside that sustains it.