Meat price
Cheap meat is a term used to describe relatively inexpensive meat (e.g. fatty cuts of lamb or mutton)[1] or to indicate that the consumer price of meat does not include the overall costs of industrial meat production. The term cheap meat is then either related to subsidies,[2] to hidden costs[3] or to non-material costs ("moral cost") of meat production. Non-material costs can be related to issues such as animal welfare (e.g. treatment of animals, over-breeding).[4][5][6] The term is used by critics of the meat industry.[7]
The meat industry is subsidized with billions of dollars by governments who support their meat industries. The OECD estimates the total "producer support" in OECD countries for 2012 as follows: 18bn USD for beef and veal, 7.3bn USD for pigmeat, 6.5bn USD for poultry and 1bn USD for sheepmeat (provisional numbers).[8] Hidden costs of meat production can be related to the environmental impact of meat production and to the effect on human health (such as resistant antibiotics).[9]
Bibliography
- Lymbery, Philip. Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. ISBN 1408846446[10]
References
- ^ Deborah Gewertz, Frederick Errington, Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands, University of California Press, 2010. ISBN 0520260937
- ^ Deutsche Welle, Agriculture – The high cost of cheap meat, January, 11 2013
- ^ Meat Atlas 2014 – Facts and figures about the animals we eat, chapter: The hidden cost of steak, page 20, download Meat Atlas as pdf
- ^ The Guardian, Why cheap meat costs the Earth, 4 September 2013
- ^ Huffington Post / RollingStone, Animal Cruelty Is The Price We Pay For Cheap Meat, 12/10/2013
- ^ ABC Australia, How much is cheap meat really costing us?, 21 Jun 2013
- ^ Chicago tribune, The costs of cheap meat – Critics of factory farms say we pay a high price for low-cost food, September 24, 2010
- ^ OECD, Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2013, 2013, p. 317, table: "OECD: Producer Single Commodity Transfers (USD)"
- ^ The New York Times, The High Cost of Cheap Meat, June 2 2011
- ^ The Guardian, Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery – review, 31 January 2014