Gwangju News had a rare opportunity to sit down with Robert Goodland, former environmental advisor to the World Bank for 23 years.

The large man seems tiny up on the huge stage, but his voice booms out over the audience and brings a big reaction as he reads from his list. “Mu, … kimchi!” Some people chortle. “Gakdugi, miyuk guk!” More people giggle. “San-yachae dolsot bibimbap!” The audience laughs and claps freely, maybe at the relentlessly convincing nature of the Korean vegetarian dishes, or his British-Korean accent. On this high note at the end of his speech, the man steps around the podium to face the audience and gives a long, low bow, and soon after his presentation Gwangju News has a rare opportunity to sit down with Robert Goodland, former environmental advisor to the World Bank for 23 years.

GN: How do you do, Dr. Goodland? Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

RG: I’m an environmental scientist and a tropical ecologist. I worked for the World Bank in Washington, DC as their environmental advisor for 23 years and I found the job very difficult because most of what they did was not very good, so I drafted a whole slew of policies which, one by one, they finally implemented. For example, they were effectively promoting a method involving deforestation to cure tobacco, which is very bad for the forest and tobacco is very bad for your health, but it was very unpopular to say that the bank shouldn’t give loans for growing tobacco then, which was back in 1979-80. 

I wrote most of the bank’s social and environmental policies. One was on environmental assessment, one on wild lands and biodiversity, but the one I’m most proud of is on indigenous people: vulnerable ethnic minorities. My hobby horse right now is pushing something called FPIC’ which stands for Free Prior Informed Consent; FPIC as known to the insiders. We had a good long struggle for 15 years, but now it is enshrined in the UNDRIP or the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is now exactly five years old. It was circulating for ten years at least, but now even the US and Canada and most nations have signed it; the hold-outs were Canada and the US.

GN: What brings you to Gwangju?

RG: These days, I’m working on promoting the fact that all our commitments to Kyoto and Cancun and everywhere else can be met if we all go meat-free just 25 percent. This is because at least 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are because of the life cycle and supply chain of livestock products (meaning all meats, dairy, and by-products). [Read more athttp://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf]

The world raises over 50 billion farm animals each year for food, and this has a major impact on global warming. This is not just from the cows producing methane in their farts, but also because it leads to the destruction of tropical rainforests and other special places of nature as farmers chop down old trees to plant grass to grow animals for meat. This means other animals that live wild amongst the old trees face extinction, and soil erosion and depletion and other environmental threats arise.

And yet meat is just not efficient to produce, compared to vegetable-type food sources. For example, we need 500 times as much land to produce 1kg of beef as compared with 1kg vegetables. We need 30kg of vegetation to produce 1kg of beef. Or, to put it another way, protein derived from meat requires 25 times more energy to produce than comparable protein from grain. And finally, with regard to the growing problem of water, to produce 1kg of wheat we only need about 250 liters, but we need about 25,000 liters to produce 1 kg of meat!

Also, these days more than half of the maize we grow goes to animal feedlots [massive industrial farms], while one child dies every 45 minutes from malnutrition-related sickness. [http://www.worldwatch.org/]

GN: How has your trip to Korea been going? Have you learned anything from any of the other speakers at the UEA NGO forum?

RG: On this trip here to my wife’s first homeland (in Korea), I’ve discovered brown rice. A question for your readers is: Why isn’t brown rice more commonly eaten here?! It’s much more nutritious, and a lot more delicious than white rice!

By Julian Warmington