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Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?

Hannah Ritchie · 9 Feb 2026

Others here said this too

Making food more expensive is not a way to fix the food system, because higher food prices fall hardest on the poorest people.

Their wordsSimply making fossil fuels more expensive without having affordable alternatives just makes energy more expensive, which hits the poorest hardest.

Also said by George Monbiot

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Hannah Ritchie did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Taking away meat and dairy subsidies would raise meat prices by only a few per cent, nowhere near enough to close the gap with meat substitutes.

    Their wordsRemoving subsidies would raise meat prices a little, but only by cents to tens of cents per kilogram.

  2. Our reading

    Quoted subsidy totals for meat and fossil fuels mostly describe unpriced damage, not money any government could take back and spend elsewhere.

    Their wordsAgain, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull

  3. Our reading

    Making food more expensive is not a way to fix the food system, because higher food prices fall hardest on the poorest people.

    Their wordsSimply making fossil fuels more expensive without having affordable alternatives just makes energy more expensive, which hits the poorest hardest.

  4. Our reading

    People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.

    Their wordsAcross much of the world, the opposite is happening: people are switching from these plant-based staples to meat and dairy as their incomes rise.

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