Animal-people Meat Tax Is Critical for a Vegan World

On today’s show, we will highlight the urgent need for the more affluent western world to adopt animal-people meat tax and its advantages.

In 2019, for the first time, a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Shining World Leadership for Lives-Saving-Hero Award laureate, called on the world to eat less animal-people meat, especially in wealthy nations. It clearly indicated that cutting down the short-lived greenhouse gases (GHG), primarily methane, emitted by the animal-people raising industry for food, is vital and the final option for humanity to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Taxing certain items or behaviors to promote change is nothing new. Alcohol, tobacco, and sugar are prime examples of this strategy, often providing a “win-win” for the population and the government. The concept of a health tax on animal-people meat was also proposed by the True Animal Protein Price (TAPP) Coalition, a non-profit organization formed in the Netherlands in 2018.

On November 12, 2022, TAPP Coalition director Jeroom Remmers held a press conference at COP27 discussing the options to reduce GHG emissions from high-income countries by 40% as one of the crucial tools to meet the goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement. In high-income countries, the carbon footprint from an animal-people meat and dairy diet is an astounding 82%. Amongst other measures, it is widely understood that the animal-people meat tax is low-cost, feasible, environmentally effective, and has high transformational potential. By 2050, an animal-people meat tax could free up millions of square kilometers of land and reduce CO2 emissions by 8 billion tons annually. In addition, other foreseen benefits would be reduced food waste, shorter supply chains, and boosting local economies with a farm-to-table, buy-local approach. “A tax on meat can reduce meat consumption within one year – can half the meat consumption. So, a powerful meat tax can really help.”

Through the work of the TAPP Coalition in the EU, many countries in Western Europe are now taking up the idea of a tax on animal-people meat, with an accompanying subsidy for fruits and vegetables. For example, Spain has a 10% VAT on animal-people meat and fish and has reduced VAT on vegetables and fruits from 4.0% to 0.0%.

So far, animal-people meat tax is justified by environmental and health concerns. With the introduction of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill in the UK, we look forward to seeing more animal-people meat taxes introduced, driven by the immense suffering of billions of land and sea animal-individuals killed annually for food.