Yesterday evening, June 12, Youth Blast ended with a plenary session. Mr. Sha ZuKang (pictured above), Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (RIO+20), gave a speech, encouraging youth to play an active role in the decisionmaking and to push for sustainable development not only in words, but also in actions: “It must not fail” he declared, “Make them wake up - you know how to do it”. Sha also gave his opinion on the concept of Green Economy, calling it a means to an end and stressing the importance of Green Economy in the context of sustainable development.

The following days will be marked by a build-up towards the actual conference. We hope to see an important impact from the Major Groups and will report on the developments we encounter.

Cattle in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Photo by Luciana Soldi Bullara of flickr (CC-by-nc)

One topic is missing from the current debate on the future of the planet at Rio de Janeiro, so it seems: The environmental cost of eating meat. Enter a new movement springing up at the 2012 Earth Summit: RIO+Veg.

We encounter the activists of the young initiative at Youth Blast. They started only a few months ago as a group of four, but now enjoy support from a host of partners, including the Brazilian Vegetarian Society. RIO+Veg aims to combine environmentalism and vegetarianism, inserting animal advocacy into the discourse on sustainability.

Giving up meat for the environment? “Some people are not comfortable when we talk about that” wonders member Cassa. Philosophically, the activist rely on classic animal rights stance. Guillerme, a young Brazilian biologist, explains what he sees as the right of animals as sentient being: The right not to suffer pain, the right not to be owned, the right to live. “Sustainability is also the well-being of animals!”, he declares. The large-scale exploitation of animals which currently takes place globally follows the same logic like racism, homophobia, and slavery, RIO+Veg activists insist: “Might makes right”. In this, they are on par with the animal liberation philosophy of Peter Singer.

The consequent result of this kind of ethic, of course, is a vegan lifestyle. A quite uncommon position in a country that has an annual per-capita-consumption of meat of more than 80 kg (much like Germany, for example), with growing tendencies. RIO+Veg’s strategy is to highlight the problematic environmental consequences of this pattern of consumption. They identify beef production as the number one cause responsible for Brazil’s greenhouse emissions– a shared result of deforestation for grazing cattle and soya production (for the export of high-protein animal feed).

RIO+Veg have a long way to go in their goal to, at least, reduce meat consumption to a sizable degree. Meat production, although not as labour-intensive as other industries, is an important economic factor for the new Brazil. Even within Youth Blast, RIO+Veg had some trouble bringing across their relatively modest message of eating less meat, rather than crying out “Meat is Murder!”.

But there is hope on the horizon: São Paulo, for example, has adopted a “Meatless Monday” policy. Still, the chances of the movement having a significant impact on mainstream Rio+20 politics are, realistically speaking, non-existent at this point.