Having consistently been reassured that “the Albanese Labor Government will never compromise on biosecurity”, we now learn that the government has lifted the ban on imports of beef raised in Mexico and Canada and finished in the US.

While most of the leading Australian meat industry bodies seem unperturbed by this, Cattle Australia has called for an “independent review” of the changes. National Party leader David Littleproud echoes this, saying he has “serious concerns” about the timing and process of the decision.

Little attention has been paid to the fact that both Mexico and the US have had Category 1 status for importing beef into Australia for more than a decade, and Canada achieved this status about a year ago. So there seems to be little reason for all the political foaming and media froth and bubble about this announcement.

Biosecurity concerns may be valid from the beef industry’s point of view. But consumers, politicians and the nation as a whole seem reluctant to deal with the bigger picture, because that picture is not only inconvenient, but also, let’s face it, confronting. In that picture — which will make about 88% of Australians extremely uncomfortable — we need to reconsider the whole enterprise of beef production and consumption, both imports and exports.

Scientists have long been aware that animal agriculture is one of the world’s most reliable and deadly sources of environmental pathogens for human beings. But more critically, scientists have been warning us for decades that “immediate and far-reaching changes in current animal agriculture practices and consumption patterns are both critical and timely if GHGs from the farm animal sector are to be mitigated”.

And yet our media and politicians choose to devote their scarce time and resources to counting the number of importing angels that can dance on the head of a biosecurity pin.

My concern about this choice of priorities has crystallised around another recent agriculture-focused announcement that has received little, if any, media coverage. This initiative seems quite unrelated to biosecurity, but its implications dwarf the media’s obsession with the recent relaxation in beef import restrictions.

The Australian Government has just unveiled a $76 million “climate-smart” farm support package, and while the initiative may be superficially attractive, it is deeply informed by methane denial. It is significant not for what it includes, but for what it leaves out.

The package’s five-year, $300 million parent scheme is also marked by an absence of any targeted plans to reduce our reliance on the world’s greatest source of human-generated methane – animal agriculture. Nor does it seek to hasten or support the inevitable transition towards plant-based and lab-grown sources of dietary protein.

This neglect is despite a clearly emerging global consensus, led by the IPCC, that it is now a “ survival imperative” for us to make such a move as an essential part of any strategy that hopes to combat global overheating.

The federal government is certainly funding a $140 million “ transition assistance package” of another sort. But this will only ensure that any sheep we export by sea after May 2028 are dead. While making our animal-handling practices more humane, this does nothing to fight climate change, and is actually heading in precisely the wrong direction environmentally. It entrenches the notion that animal agriculture has a long-term future – just as the “climate-smart” farming package itself does.

On a more promising note, one Melbourne-based producer of cultivated meat recently made the news for having received a modest $100,000 grant, under the federal government’s Industry Growth Program, to help it scale up production and reduce costs. And a number of other businesses and state governments are taking matters into their own hands, including the Victorian Government, which invested $12 million in 2022 to help grain-crop industries move into the production of plant-based protein.

These are small steps in the right direction. But the new federal package remains mired in the 19th-century assumption that Australia can continue to ride on the sheep’s (and cow’s) back, all the way to climate devastation. It gives the impression that we just need to tinker with our farming methods to make them more “climate-smart” – an expression that appears around 60 times in the program description, as if saying this often enough will make everything better all by itself. Meanwhile, the word “methane” appears nowhere among the projects to be funded.

Australian politicians and media commentators occasionally pay lip service to the importance of methane as a greenhouse gas. But they systematically overlook the fact that mitigating, and ultimately eliminating human-generated methane, is an essential component of any serious effort to addressing global overheating.

Scientists may valiantly continue the struggle to bring atmospheric carbon dioxide under control before it wreaks irreversible damage on the planet – a battle that now seems almost certainly lost. But while we come to terms with the centuries or millennia it will take even for existing levels of carbon dioxide to break down, this latest tranche of federal government funding embodies an enormous opportunity cost. It does nothing to exploit the fact that methane decomposes after just seven to twelve years, and that we could contribute to a rapid and significant decline in global heating if we were to adopt aggressive methane reduction strategies – including a decisive move away from our nostalgic reliance on animals as a source of food.

Methane may not be as abundant in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. However, it traps at least 100 times as much heat as the latter gas, and is estimated to account for 20% to 30% of global overheating since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

This is common wisdom among climate scientists. But successive Australian Governments have persisted in methane denial, thus lagging behind much of the rest of the world. For politicians and commentators of all ideological and pragmatic stripes, eating slaughtered animals is apparently too much a part of the Australian identity to be questioned.

We may have abandoned the 1980s “feed the man meat” marketing campaign. But we haven’t even begun to reckon with the environmental consequences of continuing to put other animals on our dinner plates – let alone address the ethical and health implications of this practice.

We are being left behind by those nations that are forging ahead in this area. They have seen the writing on the slaughterhouse wall, and are working assiduously to nudge the Overton window to include plant-led and lab-based approaches to climate change that would allow us to move away from animal agriculture.

Denmark is, perhaps, leading the charge, with its “groundbreaking strategy for a plant-powered future”. In 2023, it announced ‘the “world’s first action plan for plant-based foods", and has now introduced its “plant-based diplomacy initiative” aimed at inspiring the EU and its member nations to fund increased and targeted plant-based action policies and strategies.

Food awareness organisation ProVeg Brazil has just unveiled its Cultiva Project, to help Brazilian livestock farmers transition to plant-based farming. The German Government has budgeted €38 million to promote “precision-fermented, plant-based and cultivated meat and dairy alternatives”, following equally promising initiatives in Spain and the UK.

Other countries whose governments have taken notable — if sometimes tentative — steps towards animal-free agriculture include Singapore, the Netherlands, France and even the US.

Methane is the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to our short- to medium-term prospects for reining in global overheating. Of course, I can enjoy my bento box of vegan sushi while wishing everyone else would join me in my quixotic quest to address climate change one bite at a time. But we need bold federal government carrots and sticks that motivate and enable farmers and consumers to shift away from producing and consuming animal products if we hope to stand a chance against rising global temperatures and disaster-threatening sea levels and weather events.

The newly-relaxed beef import guidelines may well be relatively benign in themselves. But biosecurity remains a perennial concern as long as we continue to rely on industrial-scale animal agriculture as our primary source of protein. And it does nothing to address the vulnerability we face by relying on red meat as a $17+ billion source of annual export earnings.

With both climate change and the risk of animal-borne disease and pandemics breathing down our necks, we need urgent and decisive government action. Left to its own devices, animal agriculture will cling on until its dying breath. That will come at much higher human and economic costs than a prompt and managed transition towards plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives. And it may come much sooner than we expect.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.