Abstract:
Meat production is a human activity driven by meat
consumption, a human behaviour normalised in today's society.
Human activity stems from particular psychological patterns
(manifesting as human behaviour). It is argued that through
regulating the human behaviour of meat consumption the
environmentally harmful impacts of the human activity of meat
production can potentially be mitigated. In particular, adopting
an environmental rights perspective and a social ecological
ethic, this article proposes the introduction of a meat tax in South
Africa as an innovative means of regulating the human
behaviour of meat consumption.
In Section 1 we introduce our arguments and discuss the social,
ecological, ethical and environmental rights perspective from
which we make them. Next, in Section 2 we discuss some of the
most significant environmental harms caused by meat
production and thus, indirectly, meat consumption. Then, in
Section 3 we critically evaluate the command-and-control
regulatory measures that currently regulate the human activity of
meat production and seek in no meaningful way to regulate the
psychological patterns associated with that human activity, the
human behaviour of meat consumption. Lastly, in Section 4 we
propose a meat tax, a type of market-based mechanism, as a
regulatory measure which we argue could serve to influence
human behaviour in order to reduce meat consumption and give
better effect to the environmental right.
