Feel free to do your own research I will not accomodate laziness for topics that are so well covered on the internet. Data on it are easy to find. Empowering is better than enabling.
While porc is better than beef, chicken has even less footprint. And indeed, a lot of vegetarian products based off other crops than soy, or on fungi are less harmful for the environment than soy products, but I wasn't comparing to those.
Asking someone to provide evidence for a claim is not laziness, it’s debate.
You made what I considered an extraordinary claim, and I wanted to see if you had some data to back that up. All the data I have seen prior to this indicates that all plant-based foods have a lower environmental impact than all meat-based foods. Had you provided your data, I may have learned something new.
A cursory search to confirm that found, among various things, the environmental impact of various food sources that aligns with what I initially thought, discovering that one cow is apparently worth 230 chickens in terms of human consumption of their meat, and factory farmed chickens once fully grown are unable to move around because their weight is too much for their joints to actually bear,
this, which suggests my initial position was indeed correct.
~77% of soy production is used for animal feed, with the other ~23% being used for human consumption (food, cooking oil, biofuels), and the biggest driver for that is pork and poultry feed. Around 2/3 of the economic value of a soybean is from processing it into cake, more than 99% of which is used as animal feed.
Thus, any decrease in demand for poultry is likely to result in a decrease in demand for soybeans, and less land use for it. Further to that, the type of soy grown in South America is GM, and thus unlikely to be imported by at least the EU for human consumption.
For example, Romania grew a lot of GM soy prior to joining the EU, but joining in 2007 reduced output by 70%.
An interesting case was the cultivation of herbicide tolerant GM soybeans in Romania starting in 1999, which gave farmers new weed control options, increased average yields by over 30%, and made this crop the most profitable arable crop grown in Romania. In 2006, the GM soy varieties were grown on 137,000 ha and had reached an adoption rate of 68% compared with the total soy production area. Because of increased yields and plantings, Romania’s soy production soared, and surplus soybeans could be exported to other European countries while soybean meal imports decreased substantially. When Romania joined the European Union in 2007, where GM soybeans do not have a cultivation authorization, farmers were forced to return to conventional seed varieties. Because of strongly reduced profitability, the area planted with soybeans has shrunk by 70% within just two years, Romania became dependent on expensive soybean imports like the rest of Europe, and farmers lost a very profitable crop [13].
So I’ll ask you again, what’s your data?
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