ABSTRACT
Across the world more resources have been devoted to producing meat. Greenpeace, in its long-standing fight against deforestation in the Amazon, states that, contrary to popular belief, it is the cattle sector and not the timber industry that is the single largest driver of global deforestation. This chapter discusses the gamut of environmental and human impacts of industrial farming. It argues that ironically the mitigation process is imperative to sustain, uninterrupted, the continual commodification of food animals and its subsequent normalisation. Industrial livestock production is one of the most significant generators of ecological impacts on global, regional and local scales. Livestock production affects biodiversity in number of ways, depending upon the mode of production and cultural context. The food system is a major contributor to climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, desertification, water consumption and pollution, air pollution and energy depletion.
