The rhetoric is nearing boiling point in advance of the UN's Food Systems Summit happening tomorrow, virtually. The UN has dubbed it "The People's Summit" and says on the website that it is a "historic opportunity to empower all people to leverage the power of food systems to drive our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and get us back on track to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030."

Those goals include such lofty ambitions as ending hunger but also all poverty, ensuring quality education globally, gender parity in society, clean energy and a general "good health and well-being" for everyone.

I'm on board with that. I see the UN as one of those organizations that should lead us all in a sort of planetary round of "Kumbaya," articulating goals that together would create a far better world, if ever they were met. But we're talking about human nature here, and once the choir is done singing it's up to mere people to build roads toward those goals. And increasingly, it seems to me, people are playing politics with the process.

This is not new news. However, it's getting worse and that makes actual progress harder to achieve.

In preparation for the Summit, the UN created a series of working groups that it calls "clusters," to research, discuss, argue and ultimately submit position papers proposing solutions to the Summit. The "sustainable livestock" cluster reportedly has devolved into the now-predictable polarized posturing that will get the entire enterprise exactly nowhere.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food — part of the organization's Human Rights Commission — and historically anti-meat organizations such as Greenpeace have gone public with what they say are "leaked documents" showing that the cluster was "dominated" by meat industry interests driving the priorities contained in the three position papers that the cluster has produced: Fast Scaling of Best Practices, Technology and Management, Grazing for Soil, Climate and People, and Aligning Production and Consumption.

Those meat interests reportedly tell a different story: In a letter to the UN earlier this summer, representatives from the International Meat Secretariat and the International Poultry Council, among others, said, "It became clear ... that the very solid foundations for sustainable livestock development that have been built up over more than a decade by science led organisations are being disregarded in favour of anti-livestock rhetoric within this cluster. ... [W]e cannot continue to devote time to a process in which it is clear that we are only there to lend a veneer of inclusivity while in reality some cluster leaders are pursuing their own ideological agenda.”

And, here we are again, pointing ideological fingers at each other, hardly "united" in efforts to address the very real issues of feeding the planet without destroying the planet. The fact is, "re-balancing" (the UN's term, not mine) diets so that some populations in developed countries eat less conventional animal protein while, supposedly, impoverished countries with little historical access to meat protein eat more, is not a crazy idea. It is not a suggestion that would doom the meat industry, in the U.S., Brazil, Australia or anywhere else.

On the other hand, insisting that highly intensive livestock production systems be eliminated in exchange for some idealized pastoral system — if meat can't be cut out of the world's diet altogether — snubs the tremendous advancements the meat industry has made toward improved sustainability. You want to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions? Then you want a U.S.-style, highly intensive feedlot system rather than acres of pasture; any number of studies prove that fact.

The meat industry globally has plenty of room for improvement in this environmental sustainability space, but the way forward is to embrace the industry's accomplishments and push for more, rather than ignore those efforts and try to cut industry out of the conversation. Conversely, threatening to take the ball and go home doesn't forward the industry's goals at all; you have to be in the room where it happens, even if you don't like the other people in the room.

I'm a cynic, but I doubt this UN Food System Summit is going to yield much of anything of substance. Heck, it can't even get participants to agree on topic of conversation. That's a shame, because pro-environment groups and the meat industry could make far greater improvements working together than they have fighting it out.

What a cluster.

What a cluster

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