Some people believe that the question of eating or not eating meat is a personal matter for everyone and no one has the right to impose their will. I am not one of those people, and I will tell you why.
If someone offered you a brownie and told you how much sugar it contains, calories, how it tastes, and how much it costs, you might decide to eat it. This will be your choice. If, after you ate it, you were taken to the hospital and someone told you: “By the way, there was arsenic in the cake,” you will probably be shocked.
Having a choice is useless if you don’t know everything that can affect it. When it comes to meat and fish, we are not told anything about them, most people are ignorant in these matters. Who would believe you if you said that children in Africa and Asia are starving so that we in the West can eat meat? What do you think would happen if people knew that a third of the earth’s surface is turning into a desert due to meat production. It would have shocked people to learn that about half of the world’s oceans are on the verge of an ecological disaster due to intensive fishing.
Solve the puzzle: what product are we producing more and more people are starving to death? Give up? The answer is meat. Most people don’t believe this, but it’s true. The reason is that the production of meat is not very economical, in order to produce one kilogram of meat, ten kilograms of vegetable protein must be used. Instead, people can be fed just vegetable protein.
The reason people starve to death is because people in the rich west eat so much agricultural produce to feed their animals. It’s even worse because the West can force other, less wealthy countries to grow food for their animals when they could grow it for their own consumption.
So what is the West and what are these rich people? The West is the part of the world that controls the circulation of capital, industry and has the highest standard of living. The West consists of the countries of Europe, including the UK, as well as the USA and Canada, sometimes these countries are called the Northern Block. However, in the South there are also countries with a high standard of living, such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand, most of the countries of the southern hemisphere are relatively poor countries.
About 7 billion people live on our planet, approximately one third live in the rich North and two thirds in the poor South. In order to survive, we all use agricultural products – but in different quantities.
For example, the a child born in the US will use 12 times more natural resources in a lifetime than a child born in Bangladesh: 12 times more wood, copper, iron, water, land, and so on. Some of the reasons for these differences lie in history. Hundreds of years ago, warriors from the North conquered the southern countries and turned them into colonies, in fact, they still own these countries. They did this because the southern countries were rich in all sorts of natural resources. The European colonialists used these countries, they forced them to supply the products necessary for the operation of industry. Many inhabitants of the colonies were deprived of land and forced to grow agricultural products for European countries. During this period, millions of people from Africa were forcibly transported to the US and Europe to work as slaves. This is one of the reasons why the North has become so rich and powerful.
Colonization stopped forty or fifty years ago after the colonies regained their independence, very often in the course of wars. Although such countries as Kenya and Nigeria, India and Malaysia, Ghana and Pakistan are now considered independent, colonization made them poor and dependent on the West. Thus, when the West says it needs grain to feed its cattle, the South has no alternative but to grow it. This is just one of the few ways these countries can earn money to pay for new technologies and essential industrial goods that can be purchased in the West. The West not only has more goods and money, but it also has most of the food. Of course, not only Americans consume large amounts of meat, but in general the entire population of the West.
In the UK, the average amount of meat consumed by one person is 71 kilograms per year. In India, there are only two kilograms of meat per person, in America, 112 kilograms.
In the United States, children aged 7 to 13 eat six and a half hamburgers every week; and Fast Food restaurants sell 6.7 billion hamburgers every year.
Such a monstrous appetite for hamburgers has an impact on the whole world. Only in this millennium, and especially from the moment when people began to eat meat in such large quantities – until today, when meat-eaters literally destroy the earth.
Believe it or not, there are three times as many farmed animals as people on the planet – 16.8 billion. Animals have always had a big appetite and can eat mountains of food. But most of what is consumed comes out the other side and is wasted. All animals raised for the production of meat products consume more protein than they produce. Pigs eat 9 kilograms of vegetable protein in order to produce one kilogram of meat while a chicken eats 5 kilograms to produce one kilogram of meat.
Animals in the United States alone eat enough hay and soybeans to feed one-third of the world’s population, or the entire population of India and China. But there are so many cows there that even that is not enough and more and more cattle food is imported from abroad. The US even buys beef from the less developed countries of Central and South Africa.
Perhaps the most obvious example of waste can be found in Haiti, officially recognized as one of the poorest countries in the world, where most people use most of the best and most fertile land to grow a grass called alfalfa and huge international companies specially fly livestock to Haiti from the US to graze and put on weight. The animals are then slaughtered and the carcasses are shipped back to the US to make more hamburgers. In order to provide food for American livestock, ordinary Haitians are pushed into the highlands, where they try to farm the badlands.
In order to grow enough food to survive, people overuse the land until it becomes barren and useless. It’s a vicious circle, the people of Haiti are getting poorer and poorer. But not only American cattle consume most of the world’s food supply. The European Union is the world’s largest importer of animal food – and 60% of this food comes from southern countries. Imagine how much space the UK, France, Italy and New Zealand take up together. And you will get exactly the area of land that is used in poor countries to grow food for animals.
More and more farmland is being used to feed and graze 16.8 billion farm animals. But what’s even more frightening is that the area of fertile land is constantly decreasing, while the annual birth rate on the planet is growing all the time. The two sums do not add up. As a result, two-thirds (of the poor) of the world’s population live from hand to mouth in order to maintain a high standard of living for the one-third of the wealthy.
In 1995, the World Health Organization released a report called “Filling the Gap”, which described the current situation as a global catastrophe. According to the report hundreds of millions of people in the South live their entire lives in extreme poverty, and about 11 million children die every year from disease due to malnutrition. The gap between North and South is getting wider every day and if the situation does not change, hunger, poverty and disease will spread even faster among those two thirds of the world’s population.
The basis of the problem is the huge waste of food and land used for meat production. Sir Crispin Tekal of Oxford, the UK government’s environmental adviser, says it’s logically impossible for the entire world’s population (6.5 billion) to live solely on meat. There are simply no such resources on the planet. Only 2.5 billion people (less than half of the total population) can eat in such a way that they get 35% of their calories from meat products. (That’s how the people of the United States eat.)
Just imagine how much land could be saved and how many people could be fed if all the vegetable protein used to feed livestock was consumed in its pure form by people. About 40% of all wheat and corn is fed to livestock, and vast areas of land are used to grow alfalfa, peanuts, turnips and tapioca for feed. With the same ease on these lands it would be possible to grow food for people.
“If the whole world followed a vegetarian diet—fed on plant foods and dairy products such as milk, cheese and butter,” says Tikel, “then there would be enough food to feed 6 billion people right now. In fact, if everyone became vegetarian and eliminated all meat products and eggs from their diet, then the world’s population could be fed with less than one-fourth of the land now cultivated!
Of course, meat-eating is not the only cause of world hunger, but it is one of the main reasons. So that Don’t let anyone tell you that vegetarians only care about animals!
“My son convinced me and my wife Carolyn to become vegetarians. He said that if everyone eats cereals instead of feeding them to farm animals, no one will starve to death.” Tony Benn