Plan to transform our economy, not disrupt it
My colleague Matt Benson recently pointed me to a paper by a European think tank on cultured meat: a topic I had not given any thought to since it hit the headlines in Australia about 6–7 years ago. The paper he sent was making bold claims about cultured meat making beef cattle farming in the US unviable by the end of the decade.
With a healthy dose of scepticism about think tank prognostications, I dug a bit deeper and, to my surprise, cultured meat has come a long way since Mark Post ate a quarter of a million dollar beef burger in 2013.
Ten years ago, it was a university-led, edge of technology field producing ‘in-vitro’ meat. Then it shifted into start-up mode, with media events and serious funding. And now major companies (e.g. Merck and Cargill) and governments (e.g. China and Israel) are invested.
Maybe the claim that beef production will be unviable in the US by 2030 is still a little bold, but there’s no doubt the industry is moving faster. There are technical, social and legal hurdles to jump, but if cultured meat starts to replace meat livestock, it is going to have a big impact in Australia.
Meat is one of our top five commodity exports. Beef alone is worth something like $8–10 billion per annum in export revenue. At the last Census, about 185,000 people were employed in breeding, raising, slaughtering and shipping livestock for meat.
Many of these jobs are in rural Australia. Toowoomba, Queensland has 5,000 jobs directly reliant on the industry (7% of all jobs). For places like Western Downs and Lockyer Valley (also in Queensland), it’s more like 15%. The map below shows where the industry is geographically concentrated (I’ve zoomed in on Queensland otherwise the map doesn’t help).
And that’s just the people directly employed. There are also people working in support services: veterinarians, livestock exchanges (often a source of revenue for rural councils), stock agents, and equipment manufacturers. And some farmers make a good living growing fodder.
If cultured meat starts to replace livestock, many of these jobs will be at risk. And what replaces it may be cultured meat production facilities in urban areas (maybe in places that once made cars). Anywhere you see a microbrewery could conceivably accommodate a cultured meat company.
Now it is probably going to be ten years or more before we see any significant impacts on the livestock industry here. I think ten years is a sufficient (but not excessive) time to plan for what could eventually be the end of an entire industry; one that has been here since colonisation.
To deal with this, we could do what we in Australia are good at doing: let lobbying and blocking policy impede the emergence of a new industry. I wrote a PhD thesis on this, and I expect this strategy will work; for a while at least. Agribusiness did it to mining a century ago. And more recently, a committed group of mining industry lobbyists and politicians have been doing it to the renewable energy sector. It seems lost on those responsible that the time and effort would be better spent managing the change and mitigating the pain people and communities will eventually feel.
Alternatively, we could ignore it entirely. Like we did with the disruption of the taxi industry by Uber. Then, when it is no longer possible to ignore it, we can implement some ad hoc policies, a mishmash of rules, and some expensive PR.
But we don’t have to take either of these approaches. We have had fair warning cultured meat could be coming. And not only that, cultured meat production is expected to reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, address the ethical issues of industrial-scale livestock farming, and generally help decouple food production from the use of land, water and energy (Meat & Livestock Australia are obviously mindful of this competition; they are seeking to go net zero emissions by 2050). And if we don’t decouple soon, the origin of our steaks will be the least of our worries.
Australia is known as a reliable, clean food producer and various government bodies are gung-ho for start-ups. Cultured meat seems like a match made in heaven. If we can just take R&D, science and innovation seriously, we stand a chance of being part of this change, not being hit by it. As one research paper said, make it a transformation, not a disruption.
