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August 9, 2008 at 08:55:40
Feast or Famine: Meat Production and World Hunger by Mark Hawthorne Page 1 of 1 page(s) |
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Hanging in the Newseum in Washington, DC, is a photo that is about as heart-rending an image as you’re likely to find anywhere. Taken by Kevin Carter for The New York Times in 1993, the photo depicts a starving Sudanese toddler crumpled on the ground, as if her stick-like legs could no longer bear the weight of her large head and swollen stomach, bloated from the malnourishment disease called kwashiorkor. While that alone is disturbing, what makes the tableau truly haunting is the vulture patiently waiting just a few feet behind the emaciated child. This photograph earned Carter a Pulitzer Prize and epitomized the toll famine is taking on developing countries around the world. Tragically, of course, hunger has only become an even graver issue in the last 15 years -- a point made clear in a report released July 29 from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Recommending urgent action for long-term relief, the CSIS report calls for “a strategic U.S. approach to the global food crisis.” “Food crisis,” however, implies some recent, short-term cause and effect, when in fact the “perfect storm” of rising energy costs, grain hoarding, government subsidies, drought and the demand for biofuels diverts attention from an entrenched industry and a remedy neither the CSIS nor many social activists want to contemplate: eliminating meat production. “Whoa!” you say. “Don’t take away my steaks and cheeseburgers.” Meat-eating is such an ingrained aspect of Western culture that proposing its demise, even to save the world, deserves some discussion. Fair enough. 
The United Nations estimates that 854 million people -- nearly 13 percent of the world’s human population -- go hungry every day. And the problem is only getting worse. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN’s World Food Program, says, “The world’s misery index is rising.”
So is our hunger for meat. As Gene Baur observes in Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food, in 1950, 50,000 farms produced 630 million “meat” chickens in the United States. By 2005, the U.S. had 20,000 fewer farms -- but they were producing 8.7 billion chickens for meat. That’s a lot of chicken feed. In fact, every year industrial animal factories in the U.S. feed 157 million metric tons of legumes, cereal and vegetable protein to livestock, resulting in 28 million metric tons of animal protein for human consumption. Nutritious plant-based food that could feed humans instead goes to feed animals in a very inefficient use of resources.
Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC, states it succinctly: “People go hungry because much of arable land is used to grow feed grain for animals rather than people.” He offers as one example the Ethiopian famine of 1984, which was fueled by the meat industry. “While people starved, Ethiopia was growing linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for European livestock,” he says. “Millions of acres of land in the developing world are used for this purpose. Tragically, 80 percent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with food surpluses which are fed to animals for consumption by the affluent.”
The demand for meat has been especially dramatic in developing countries. “China’s meat consumption is increasing rapidly with income growth and urbanization, and it has more than doubled in the past generation,” says Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. As a result, land once used to provide grains for humans now provides feed for chickens and pigs.
The USDA and the United Nations state that using an acre of land to raise cattle yields 20 pounds of usable protein. If soybeans were grown instead, that same acre would yield 356 pounds of protein. Animal agriculture also wastes valuable water resources. Population biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich note that a pound of wheat can be grown with 60 gallons of water, whereas a pound of meat requires 2,500 to 6,000 gallons.
Here’s another way to look at it. According to the aid group Vegfam, a ten-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, ten people growing corn and only two people producing cattle. Reducing meat production by just ten percent in the U.S. would free enough grain to feed 60 million people, estimates Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer. Sixty million people -- that’s the population of Great Britain, which, by the way, could support 250 million people on an all-vegetable diet.
Not surprisingly, the meat industry has a beef with these statistics. They say, for example, that the grains and soybeans fed to farmed animals are not of the high quality that humans would expect to eat (tell that to a starving child). Yet it’s difficult to dispute the fact that animal agribusiness uses land and water that could be used to grow plant foods for human consumption.
As Rifkin observes, it is ironic that millions of consumers in developed countries are dying from diseases of affluence such as heart attacks, diabetes and cancer, brought on by eating animal products, while the poor in the Third World are dying of diseases of poverty caused by being denied access to land to grow food grain for their families.
“We are long overdue for a global discussion on how to promote a diversified, high-protein, vegetarian diet for the human race,” says Rifkin, whose book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture addresses the moral paradoxes of eating meat.
Are those steaks and cheeseburgers really worth all the lives they take -- human and non-human? It would be naïve to think the world will go vegetarian overnight, or even in a few decades. But looking at Carter’s powerful photograph, I can’t help but believe we have been woefully mistaken in how we treat those with whom we share this planet. If we hope to bequeath a sustainable world to future generations, we’ll have to shake loose this meat-produced disaster and embrace a kinder way of living.
Mark Hawthorne is the author of Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism (www.strikingattheroots.com).
http://www.markhawthorne.com
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food and farming
Greetings. I take it you are not a farmer. and do not realise that plants that we use for food require the soil that they grow in to be fertilized to replace the substances that the plants use from the soil to grow? our problem is not using feed for animals. our problem is the huge corporate farms that grow usually only one crop on thousands of acres. and then use chemical fertilizers made from petroleum to fertilize the soil to plant the same crop again and again. Petro fertilizer replaces some of the used elements in the soil, but not all of them. in the old days when farmers farmed they planted a diversity of crops on their land, because they knew that no one could predict the weather and some crops did better then others when things got tough, like droughts or too much rain. with the small farmers no matter the weather they ended up with some of their plantings flourishing. Here in Maine when it is a drought year peanuts do well. in a ordinary year they do not do well up here at all. so family farms were diversified and also since they did not make the huge profits that the corporate farms did, they could not afford chemical fertilizers and instead used manure from another crop they raised. Meat and milk for cheese and butter, beef and chickens. the manure from these animals raised for food was returned to the soil enriching it naturally and not synthetically. soil fertilized with animal manure is enriched with all the elements that were taken from the soil by the plants used to feed the food animals that were raised on all family farms. when one raises plants with only chemical fertilizers one does not enrich the soil. most of the fertilizer gets washed away in the rains. it does not become a organic part of the soil. soils used to plant the same plant year after year become barren in time. just as the plantations in the old south did when they switched to cash crops like cotton, which like corn used up a huge amount of energy from the soil that was not replaced since the plantations did not raise food animals in enough quantity to get enough manure for fertilizer. those soils from back then are still barren. drive through the south and look at the old cotton farms to see what I mean. to end hunger it would be necessary for us to go back to farmers growing crops, not corporations growing only money crops like corn or soybeans. sell off the land taken by the agricultural monopoly in the form of corporate farms and put people back on the land where they belong. then if you want to be a vegetarian you will at least be able to get naturally grown vegetables to eat and not synthetic fertilized and crippled nutritionally ones. don't blame the animals but rather the ignorance of our corporate farms for the shortage of foods. by edward stein (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 19 comments) on Saturday, Aug 9, 2008 at 8:17:20 PM  (0+)
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Reply: Thank you for helping to bring sanity to this discussion!!
The traditional farmer planted grain crops on some of his fields, had orchards in other areas, and also used to plant grasses including alfalfa and just plain old grass as part of crop rotation. This rotation ensured that the soil was restored naturally. And the grasses ended up being hay - and that fed the cattle. Big Agra encouraged the farmers to abandon these practices in favor of huge mono crops. Corn became an industry on its own - and there was so much corn that farmers grew special types of it so that cattle would be fed. Fertilizer comes from petroleum now - and not cow or other barnyard manure because that is what Big Agriculture wanted. But now that there is a premium on oil products, we need barnyard animals more than ever. But that is not the fault of either the cattle nor is it the fault of the public. Now we have this nonsense against meat eating and I have no idea who is behind it. I think a lot of city dwellers think that if we stop eating cows, the farmers will simply put the cows in their living rooms and start treating them like family. Should everyone in te world stop eating meat tomorrow, all the livestock would be slaughtereed within months. (Okay maybe a few animals would be kept as pets, Porky the Pig, and Minnie the cow. But most would perish.) And then what? In California, the cows have beautiful pastures that help keep our planet oxygenated - as for every cow there are acres of meadows and wild flowers, grasses, bushes etc. Slaughter our beasts and here is what happens: We wouldn't see crops grown for the poor - every time a ranch goes down in CA it is turned into a casino or into a vineyard! And the vineyards deprive all animals of habitat - evn the birds face extinction from the over-pesticided acreage of barren soil with the metal trellisses and skimply little greens growing. Are the poor going to live on wine and casino chips?? A local sports writer here in Lake County says that 8 to 15% of all CA deer perish each year through loss of habitat. Casino parking lots will not offer any place for badgers, foxes, wolves, birds of all kinds, rabbits, squirrels, salamanders, etc to flourish. And vineyards do just as poorly in terms of animal habitat. IMHO, Only those who have the meadows for the cows, sheep, horses etc are being good stewrds of the land. by Carol Sterritt (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 6 comments) on Tuesday, Aug 12, 2008 at 3:25:14 PM (0+)
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thank you
I think the commentor who said you know nothing about world hunger should search the internet where he will find that it is he and not you who knows nothing about world hunger. I wrote something like this when I decried the Gates Foundation deciding to use the Heifer Foundation to feed the impoverished of Africa. While I applaud their concern, introducing a meat- based diet to the world will only cause more hunger. Too much grain and water are already being expended to feed the animals of meat- rich countries. Even Gandhi in the 40's observed that the world cannot sustain more meat-eating countries. There is nothing wrong with making our world more vegetarian where we can, and it wouldn't hurt us in America to eat much less meat which is not only detrimental to our health but even to our planet - not to say the terrible suffering we inflict on our animals in the CAFOs (confined animal farm operations). If you are a Christian, you might have read Genesis where the Creator started us off on a completely vegetarian diet. Obviously, He knew what would be good for us. If only we would be so wise. As re the Heifer International program - Africa still has it share of primitive practices. I watched in horror how they took a young goat raising it up and spreading its legs while it bleated pitifully and then someone used a spear to thrust in its heart. This done to eradicate the "sins" of a young boy caught up in killing during the Darfur raids. How many more animals are going to be killed so violently to atone for wrongdoing in the belief that someone will become "purified?" by Suzana Megles (66 articles, 0 quicklinks, 21 diaries, 363 comments [43 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 10, 2008 at 1:20:17 PM (0+)
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Meat Production and World Hunger
Comment from Ratings: Sadly, people just don't want to hear about this important relationship between meat production and world hunger. Why? I can only conjecture it must be that even the thought of lessoning their meat intake is just too much for them to bear. I feel sorry for anyone who can't even try to find even a "smidgen" of truth in this well-written article because there is much more than a smidgen of truth in it. by Suzana Megles (66 articles, 0 quicklinks, 21 diaries, 363 comments [43 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 10, 2008 at 1:45:03 PM (0+)
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