Veganmodernism, our final strategy for meat abolition? - Stijn Bruers [IARC2020]
How can we eliminate the market for animal products? We can target the demand side or the supply side, by changing respectively the behavior of individual consumers or the choices of food producers. For each target, we can apply either push or pull strategies: making animal products less attractive or making animal-free foods more attractive. Of the four possibilities, Stijn argues that the supply side pull strategy has the best prospects, because the other three have poor track records over the past decades. Furthermore, considering the future timeline (e.g. when global peak meat production is expected in a business as usual scenario), the cobenefits (e.g. carnivorous pets and wild animals can also benefit from cultivated meat) and the market failure (undersupply) of innovative research, investments in new food technologies become most important. Hence, Stijn argues that animal activists should focus on financially supporting open source research and development of new technologies such as cultivated meat. This implies the animal rights movement should shift more towards veganmodernism, just like the environmental movement gave birth to ecomodernism.
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