Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s the other way around. Meat, dairy, etc. production is what does not scale well. Low income countries don’t have nearly as much of it because high income countries have to subsidize the hell out of animal farming to make it as common as it is. It actually takes significantly less plant farming to eat plants directly
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
Pesticide and fertilizer use is significantly lower
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
For transport, it’s actually not the driver of food emissions. The production itself is more important, especially when it comes to animal products
Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.
Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.
This data shows that this is the case when we look at individual food products. But studies also shows that this holds true for actual diets; here we show the results of a study which looked at the footprint of diets across the EU. Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%.
Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s the other way around. Meat, dairy, etc. production is what does not scale well. Low income countries don’t have nearly as much of it because high income countries have to subsidize the hell out of animal farming to make it as common as it is. It actually takes significantly less plant farming to eat plants directly
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Pesticide and fertilizer use is significantly lower
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/
Even if we maximally used manure, it’s still lower
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
For transport, it’s actually not the driver of food emissions. The production itself is more important, especially when it comes to animal products
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local