Top green energy chief Lord Turner told on Wednesday how he had slashed his beef consumption to “almost zero” and his few red meat meals were now normally duck or venison.
The peer, who chairs the Energy Transitions Commission, stressed that the world’s forests can only be saved by cutting back on the demands driving their destruction such as red meat and palm oil production.
Lord Turner, a former CBI boss and first chairman of Britain’s Climate Change Committee, issued the warning after a report suggested that paying for measures to stop deforestation would cost between $100 billion (£80 million) to $150 billion (£120 million).
He told Times Radio: “We need to realise that a diet which is very heavy in red meat consumption, on average across the world, is incompatible with maintaining the forests of the world.
“Unless we get either a shift in consumer behaviour where people eat less red meat, this does not mean no red meat, but significantly less red meat, or the development of synthetic alternatives, there may be a technology alternative here, then the total global demand will continue to drive this deforestation process.”
He told how he had cut back “dramatically” on red meat.
“I eat almost no red meat now....maybe three red meat a month, and primarily duck and venison, not beef,” he said.
“I used to be a big beef eater, I’ve cut it almost to zero.”
He emphasised that the current sum from wealthy nations to reduce deforestation in developing countries, of a few billion, was far too little and only a “stop gap measure” over the next five to ten years rather than a long-term solution.
He explained further: “Ultimately, the idea of saving the rainforests by paying people not to deforest, which is the idea that many people have, is not going to work in the long term because the figures are just too big.
“Unless we find some way eventually of switching off demands which drive rainforest deforestation, which are fundamentally red meat, meat in general and red meat in particular, and palm oil, unless we have that as an eventual solution then no amount of money is going to solve this problem in the long term.”
As food inflation increased by 19.1 per cent year-on-year in the UK, the sharpest jump since August 1977, a senior Tory MP called for the country to produce more of what the population needs.
Farmer Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, deputy chairman of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “Food (inflation) is being stubbornly high.
“That is largely driven by food coming in from abroad ...what it means is we have got to be producing more food ourselves, rather than flying it around the world, increasing air miles.”
