Health, air pollution and animal agriculture

Although animal agriculture is critical to the subsistence of smallholders in some poor countries, the global detrimental impact of animal farming is now both well documented and overwhelming. Animal farming is a primary cause of deforestation (De Sy et al., 2015), biodiversity loss (Machovina et al., 2015), antibioresistance (O’Neill, 2015) and infectious diseases emergence and amplification (Rohr et al., 2019). Moreover, it contributes significantly to water pollution, water scarcity and climate change (Godfray et al., 2018; Poore & Nemecek, 2018; Springmann et al., 2017). Additionally, the exploitation of farmed animals, especially in its widespread intensive forms, raises various moral issues. In this paper, we discuss another impact of animal farming, that on air pollution and in turn on human health. While this impact is also potentially considerable, we stress that it has been largely overlooked by regulators as well as by researchers, and in particular by economists.