In other words, the war on beef and dairy stands to get a lot worse.

Agriculture covers more than 40% of Earth’s habitable land and plays a central role in both climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet the impact of agriculture is far from evenly distributed across space.

In a new study published in Nature Food, Baoxiao Liu and her colleagues from Leiden’s Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) mapped where agriculture causes the greatest damage worldwide.

Liu and her colleagues combined data on agricultural land, biodiversity and carbon storage with information on different food products. This allowed them to create global maps showing where agriculture places the greatest pressure on climate and nature.

The results indicate that the environmental harm from farming is clustered in particular areas and is driven mainly by just a few foods, above all beef and dairy. The regions singled out are: Mexico and Central America, parts of Brazil, West Africa, India, China and Southeast Asia.

Does anyone really think that these regions will let their farmlands be eliminated without a fight? The only result of getting rid of farms is to turn them over to large, foreign owned corporations or rely on importing them which will affect food quality and cost. Then there’s also this inconvenient truth released by the University of Nebraska two years ago:

The war on farms has been relentless in the U.S. and abroad with environmentalists and their allies in legislative bodies using any and all means to shut them down using questionable scientific studies to justify their actions. It is also geared to not only undermine our food supply but also self reliance since farmers are fiercely independent people.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay