Dr. Pierre-Marie Aubert:

On food choices, we recently published a scenario whereby European agriculture would be organic by 2050 and in which we would feed all European people by 2050, while reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, which would not be enough to reach neutrality. This points to the question of whether organic agriculture is compatible with a carbon free diet, which I do not believe it is, because for organic agriculture, one needs to have bovine ruminants, for many reasons. To develop this scenario, we took all of the recommendations for diets from researchers and NGOs and national and international agencies. On this basis, we built a typical diet which would be in line with European habits, at least in the way in which they have evolved in the past 40 to 50 years. As I mentioned previously to other members, the diet we proposed, for which we implemented a scenario for the calculation, is not that different from the current diet, although it cuts by half the amount of consumption of animal products. There is also an increase of more than 50% in the consumption of fruit and vegetables for the sake of intake of fibre and vitamins, as well as a slight decrease in total calorie and protein intake, with the replacement of animal protein by additional proteins.

All in all, as I said, the order of magnitude of the changes we foresee in this scenario is totally compatible with what we have experienced in the past 45 to 50 years. As has been said, from a health point of view, there are millions of diets that are compatible with nutritional recommendations expressed in terms of proteins, lipids and carbohydrates. The way in which the nutritional recommendations are translated into an actual diet based on concrete elements and agriculture production depends on cultural habits and the type of environmental target one wants to reach. For example, because ours is an organic scenario, red meat remains quite important by comparison with other scenarios. We need the animals to maintain grasslands and for fertility transfer.

A scenario has just been published by Dr. Marco Springmann and other colleagues in the EAT consortium and the Resilience Alliance. The diet proposed is much more radical in the sense that the amount of animal protein is down to 20% of total protein intake. In our scenario it is at 40%, while in the current situation, it is 65% or 66%. The total calorie intake decreases a bit more than in our scenario. However, it is much more compatible with carbon neutrality than ours.