The tax would disincentivise environmentally sensitive farming.

The opposition wish to draw attention in particular to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the implications of this tax proposal on this system of subsidies which in 2006 accounted for 45.4% of the EU's budget. [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4407792.stm]]. Were the EU to adopt the Prop's plan therefore, this would put them in the extraordinary position of simultaneously paying farmers huge subsidies and taxing their product! Furthermore, the proposition’s tax on meat would surely be in direct opposition to CAP’s current stance of making “payments conditional on farmers meeting environmental and animal welfare standards and keeping their land in good condition” [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4407792.stm]]. CAP wishes to encourage farmers to engage in practices which are environmentally friendly by subsidising farmers who do so to the point they can compete in the industry with farmers who choose cheaper, more environmentally harmful methods of production. It does this by providing more generous subsidies to those who go into organic production, as of 2000 “funds can be given to…encourage organic farming” [[http://www.economicshelp.org/europe/cap.html]]. This is because the EU recognises that it is the intensive breeding of livestock and poultry that lead to the harms that are associated with meat consumption (‘intensive’ being the word to note). The blunt tool that is a blanket tax on meat would not only render a large amount of money spent on European farming wasted, but the extra subsidies provided to organic farmers. This is because the increase in price the tax would impose on organically farmed products would see the practice of organic farming resume an uncompetitive status. The tax proposition endorses no longer sees it viable for countries within the EU to produce their meat organically to compete with the economies of scale style production of cheap meat imported from, for instance, Brazil or Argentina. With the EU even expressing the view that “It is important to ensure that trade does not undermine the EU’s efforts to improve the protection of the welfare of animals for example” [[http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/fact/meat/2004_en.pdf]] we ought to realise that proposition's scheme would be counter-productive in influencing the methods of meat production to gravitate towards environmentally practice, which the EU is actually taking great strides to do. What we are seeing here, is the fundamental unsuitability of using a consumption tax to achieve environmental aims. By removing subsidies and pricing externalities and inputs realistically, farmers who adopt more efficient environmentally sensitive practices win in the market place. In this way the market aligns the aims of consumers with the aims of the environment, precisely as the UN recommends. But by placing a tax on consumption across the board, you remove the means and incentive for consumers to seek out more responsibly farmed meat (and very possibly create an incentive for them to increase consumption of less-responsibly produced livestock) while at the same time removing any incentive for producers to clean up their act.