MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Farmers beware: Climate activist Greta Thunberg targets food production and consumption

“Our relationship with nature is broken. But relationships can change,” Ms Thunberg said in the video

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has set her sights on changing how the world produces and consumes food in order to counteract: carbon emissions, disease outbreaks, and animal suffering.

In a video posted on Twitter, Ms Thunberg said the environmental impact of farming as well as disease outbreaks such as Covid-19, which is believed to have originated from animals, would be reduced by changing how food was produced.

“Our relationship with nature is broken. But relationships can change,” Ms Thunberg said in the video underlining the International Day for Biological Diversity.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg)

A focus on agriculture and linking the climate crisis to health pandemics is a new angle for Ms Thunberg who has typically focused her ire on policymakers and carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

“The climate crisis, ecological crisis and health crisis, they are all interlinked,” she said.

Ms Thunberg said the spillover of diseases from animals to humans was caused by farming methods, adding that a move to a plant-based diet could save up to 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Scientists say 60% of the infectious human diseases that emerged from 1990 to 2004 came from animals.

Meanwhile, demand for alternatives to regular meat is surging worldwide due to concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment.

More than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth US$140 billion by 2029.