Easy on the meat, easy on the rainforests

The reason we picked Easy on the Meat as one of the seven things you can do to lead a greener life is because livestock agriculture is the third biggest creator of greenhouse gases and is also a major cause of deforestation and soil erosion, as well as being a huge drain on our water supplies.

A report just out from Greenpeace Brazil confirms that almost 80% of Amazon deforestation in the last decade or so - 10 million hectares, an area the size of Iceland - is now used for grazing cattle. Deforestation has accounted for as much as 75% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions in some years.

Brazil is now the world's largest beef exporter and the government plans to double production in the next ten years. Since 70% of the growth in meat production happened on Amazonian land (much of it illegally) this is expected to continue.

At the same time, a government proposal is also on the table for a $21 billion fund which will dramatically cut deforestation and its related CO2 emissions through a combination of tougher law enforcement, tighter conservation, promoting sustainable land uses and so on.

Perhaps most significantly, the credit crunch is slowing down investment plans around the world, and this includes finance for farmers turning rainforest land into cattle ranches.

Some argue that conservation measures have been spectacularly unsuccessful in slowing the process of deforestation down because the economic incentives to keep doing it are so great. In the short-term, crashing grain prices and the drying up of loans to Brazilian farmers may buy us some breathing space until we all work out a way to stop this craziness.

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