By Jason Strong, Managing Director, MLA
Eating meat has been a feature of a nutritious meal across the globe throughout time. At Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) we're committed to promoting and maintaining the role of red meat on our plates and in broader society.
Australian red meat is more than just good for you. The Australian red meat and livestock industry has a production system that is leading the world with environmental sustainability, animal welfare, biosecurity, and much more.
On the 21st of March in Sydney, MLA worked with the Australian Meat Processor Corporation (AMPC) and others to host an event called the Australian Good Meat Summit. The purpose of this summit was to bring together industry leadership to hear the key messages from a series of research papers that will be published in the journal, Animal Frontiers, looking at the positive contribution of red meat and livestock production.
The Australian Good Meat Summit is a follow-up to a similar event held in Dublin, Ireland, last October. Following that event in Dublin, more than 850 scientists from around the world signed the Dublin Declaration, which endorses the positive role of red meat for our society. This a show of faith in our industry and is a big step forward in tackling the simplistic anti-meat agenda that we often hear about in the media.
The Australian Good Meat Summit brought an Australian perspective to the scientific evidence presented in Dublin and featured terrific international and Australian presenters. These included speakers who contributed to the papers that will be published in Animal Frontiers in April. We look forward to sharing more details from these papers as soon as they are published in this prestigious scientific journal.
The Good Meat Summit highlighted the important role red meat plays in our society and in human history and development.
Human civilization was built on livestock and it continues to be a bedrock of food security for modern societies today. Livestock, and particularly red meat, is the long-proven method to create healthy nutrition and secure livelihoods.
Today, red meat production is regularly challenged by those from privileged backgrounds advocating for a reduction or complete elimination of red meat from our diets and planet.
These groups often neglect to mention that that compared to other foods consumed in the Australian diet, the water and cropland footprint of Australian beef and lamb is low because their production is typically not reliant on irrigation and occurs predominantly on marginal land not suitable for cropping.
The work at the Australian Good Meat Summit demonstrated the ongoing commitment to the red meat and livestock sector and its pivotal role in modern society.
Red meat is healthy, nutritious and sustainable and is part of the answer in feeding our ever-growing world.
The Australian red meat and livestock sector needs to keep telling this story and selling its successes. It's up to industry and its producers to generate a growing snowball of scientific evidence that demonstrates immense value and contribution of the Australian red meat and livestock industry.
