Warning: This article may challenge your lifestyle.
The words "Global Food Crisis" are everywhere you look - in the news, in blogs, on TV (I'm guessing here, I don't have a TV). What does it mean? In case you've been living in a cave, here's a brief summary (thanks Avaaz):
In layman's terms: more people are starving because we are running out of grains. This problem is exacerbated by bad weather, an astounding gap in people's access to food (rich vs. poor), and horrible management of natural resources.
What do I mean? There are two problems here that not everyone is talking about: bio-fuels, which are getting some attention, and meat-based diets.
Bio-fuels are fuels made out of food, in short. Using corn or soybeans or grains, you can create fuel that will power an automobile, etc. Bio-fuels are not to be confused with using Waste Vegetable Oil as fuel, which is where you go to a restaurant, get used fuel, filter it, and put it in a diesel engine. Bio-fuels are hailed to be our saving grace from oil dependency and pollution, but largely really mean less available food for people, and are not really that much cleaner. Here's an excerpt from a National Geographic Article:
Possibly in the future, there will be a more environmentally friendly way of producing bio-fuels, but it still doesn't mean that we're not burning food for fuel. In a country like the United States where most people can't imagine what a famine would be like, bio-fuels seem to be a plausible answer. But in the majority of the world, using something you could eat to run a car (which itself is a huge privelage) is ludicrous.
More ludicrous is that in many of these countries that need every grain they can get, grains are exported as food for livestock, or used in-country to feed animals, but the price of meat is out of reach for the poor. This brings me to my second point, the meat-based diet as a contributor to the global food crisis.
Some info from GoVeg.com
Would you ever open your refrigerator, pull out 16 plates of pasta and toss them in the trash, and then eat just one plate of food? How about leveling 55 square feet of rain forest for a single meal or dumping 2,500 gallon
s of water down the drain? Of course you wouldn't. But if you're eating chicken, fish, turkey, pork, or beef, that's what you're doing—wasting resources and destroying our environment. Animals raised for food expend the vast majority of the calories that they are fed simply existing, just as we do. We feed more than 70 percent of the grains and cereals we grow to farmed animals, and almost all of those calories go into simply keeping the animals alive, not making them grow. Only a small fraction of the calories consumed by farmed animals are actually converted into the meat that people eat. A major 2006 report by the United Nations summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry. Raising animals for food, the report said, is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale ….”
Growing all the crops to feed farmed animals requires massive amounts of water and land—in fact, nearly half of the water and 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States are used to raise animals for food. Our taste for meat is also taking a toll on our supply of fuel and other nonrenewable resour
ces—about one-third of the raw materials used in America each year is consumed by the farmed animal industry. Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States, and since factory farms don't have sewage treatment systems as our cities and towns do, this concentrated slop ends up polluting our water, destroying our topsoil, and contaminating our air. Eating meat produces 100 percent of this waste—about 86,000 pounds per second! Give up animal products, and you'll be responsible for none of it.
From the Green Left:
The shift to grain-fed livestock is being driven by the wealthy nations' demands for fat-marbled meat. Currently, 70% of the US's entire grain crop is fed to livestock. Furthermore, two thirds of all the grain exported by the US goes to feed livestock rather than people. In the countries of the European Community, 57% of grain is fed to livestock. Brazil, a major producer of beef for the North American markets, now feeds 55% of its grain to livestock. Worldwide, between 1988-1990, humans consumed 822 million tonnes of grain, while livestock consumed 642 million tonnes. (New Internationalist, May, 1995).
More than half of Latin America's beef production is exported, with the rest priced beyond the range of most. From 1960 to 1980, beef exports from El Salvador increased more than 600%. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of small farmers were pushed off their land. Today, 72% of all Salvadoran infants are underfed. In Guatemala 75% of children under five years of age are undernourished, while much of the land and other resources for food production is given over to producing meat. Yet every year Guatemala exports 20 million kilos of meat to the United States. Robbins suggests that "If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10%, enough grain would be saved to feed 60 million people ... about the number of people worldwide who die of hunger-related disease every year. Of course, this doesn't mean world hunger would be solved simply if Americans ate 10% less meat, there are obviously enormous economic, social, and political realities to be faced."
"The elimination of beef will be accompanied by an ecological renaissance, a grand restoration of nature on every continent ... Countless species of plants, insects and animals will be granted a reprieve from what once appeared to be a sure death at the hands of cattle ranchers and multinational corporations." Current agricultural practices are unsustainable. The planet is losing 24 million tons of top soil every year and the biologically productive land area is shrinking. Acid rain, soil erosion, ozone layer depletion, air pollution, the extinction of species, water loss, and many other environmental degradations are steadily decreasing the world's food producing capacity.
As you can see, our insistence on eating meat is a recipe for disaster for the majority of the world. A meat based diet requires 7 times more land than a plant based diet (more info). As the globalization of Western culture continues, more people in more countries are moving to an animal b
ased diet, which is using up even more resources. There are no longer any reasons to cling to a meat based diet; a plant based diet has been proven to be better for your health, the environment, and the global community as a whole. Plant based diets free up valuable resources, among them water, (droughts have been a major issue leading up to the current crisis) and are better for the health of the soil.
As for bio-fuels, a more plausible solution to oil dependency would be to reduce consumption. This means: using public transportation or your bicycle, not driving to somewhere you could easily walk to, not flying short distances, carpooling, driving in a way that conserves fuel, buying local produce, etc. It's interesting that even as in recent years much talk of "reducing dependency on foreign oil" has been heard, people have been buying gas-guzzling SUVs. It's time to connect the dots! A car in itself is not as fuel efficient as public transportation, and more people with less fuel-efficient cars = higher dependency on oil.
We need to take responsibility for what's happening. Many of the problems are due to bad policy, but there is A LOT that we can do as individuals to make a positive change in the world. Making conscious decisions is the most important thing that we can do - we have to realize that nowhere is an island anymore, and the choices we make have global repercussions.
Thanks for reading!
The words "Global Food Crisis" are everywhere you look - in the news, in blogs, on TV (I'm guessing here, I don't have a TV). What does it mean? In case you've been living in a cave, here's a brief summary (thanks Avaaz):
Have you noticed food costing more when you shop? Here's why -- we're plunging headlong into a world food crisis. Rocketing prices are squeezing billions and triggering food riots from Bangladesh to South Africa. Aid agencies say 100 million more people are at risk of starvation right now. In Sierra Leone alone the price of a bag of rice has doubled. Fears of inflation stalk the whole world, and the worst could be yet to come. The prices of staple foods like wheat, corn and rice have almost doubled, and the crisis is slipping out of control -- so we're calling for immediate action on emergency fo
od aid, speculation and biofuels policy, while asking forthcoming summits to tackle deeper problems of investment and trade. The global food crisis touches and connects us all, creating a tsunami of hunger for the poor and damaging economies and squeezing citizens in the rich world too. becoming unaffordable for 90% of citizens.
od aid, speculation and biofuels policy, while asking forthcoming summits to tackle deeper problems of investment and trade. The global food crisis touches and connects us all, creating a tsunami of hunger for the poor and damaging economies and squeezing citizens in the rich world too. becoming unaffordable for 90% of citizens.In layman's terms: more people are starving because we are running out of grains. This problem is exacerbated by bad weather, an astounding gap in people's access to food (rich vs. poor), and horrible management of natural resources.
What do I mean? There are two problems here that not everyone is talking about: bio-fuels, which are getting some attention, and meat-based diets.
Bio-fuels are fuels made out of food, in short. Using corn or soybeans or grains, you can create fuel that will power an automobile, etc. Bio-fuels are not to be confused with using Waste Vegetable Oil as fuel, which is where you go to a restaurant, get used fuel, filter it, and put it in a diesel engine. Bio-fuels are hailed to be our saving grace from oil dependency and pollution, but largely really mean less available food for people, and are not really that much cleaner. Here's an excerpt from a National Geographic Article:
Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces. Biodiesel from soybeans fares only slightly better. Environmentalists also fear that rising prices for both crops will push farmers to plow up some 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of marginal farmland now set aside for soil and wildlife conservation, potentially releasing even more carbon bound in the fallow fields. The process also gives off large amounts of carbon dioxide, and that's where ethanol's green label starts to brown. Most ethanol plants burn natural gas or, increasingly, coal to create the steam that drives the distillation, adding fossil- fuel emissions to the carbon dioxide emitted by the yeast. Growin
g the corn also requires nitrogen fertilizer, made with natural gas, and heavy use of diesel farm machinery. Some studies of the energy balance of corn ethanol—the amount of fossil energy needed to make ethanol versus the energy it produces—suggest that ethanol is a loser's game, requiring more carbon-emitting fossil fuel than it displaces. Others give it a slight advantage. But however the accounting is done, corn ethanol is no greenhouse panacea.
g the corn also requires nitrogen fertilizer, made with natural gas, and heavy use of diesel farm machinery. Some studies of the energy balance of corn ethanol—the amount of fossil energy needed to make ethanol versus the energy it produces—suggest that ethanol is a loser's game, requiring more carbon-emitting fossil fuel than it displaces. Others give it a slight advantage. But however the accounting is done, corn ethanol is no greenhouse panacea.Possibly in the future, there will be a more environmentally friendly way of producing bio-fuels, but it still doesn't mean that we're not burning food for fuel. In a country like the United States where most people can't imagine what a famine would be like, bio-fuels seem to be a plausible answer. But in the majority of the world, using something you could eat to run a car (which itself is a huge privelage) is ludicrous.
More ludicrous is that in many of these countries that need every grain they can get, grains are exported as food for livestock, or used in-country to feed animals, but the price of meat is out of reach for the poor. This brings me to my second point, the meat-based diet as a contributor to the global food crisis.
Some info from GoVeg.com
Would you ever open your refrigerator, pull out 16 plates of pasta and toss them in the trash, and then eat just one plate of food? How about leveling 55 square feet of rain forest for a single meal or dumping 2,500 gallon
s of water down the drain? Of course you wouldn't. But if you're eating chicken, fish, turkey, pork, or beef, that's what you're doing—wasting resources and destroying our environment. Animals raised for food expend the vast majority of the calories that they are fed simply existing, just as we do. We feed more than 70 percent of the grains and cereals we grow to farmed animals, and almost all of those calories go into simply keeping the animals alive, not making them grow. Only a small fraction of the calories consumed by farmed animals are actually converted into the meat that people eat. A major 2006 report by the United Nations summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry. Raising animals for food, the report said, is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale ….” Growing all the crops to feed farmed animals requires massive amounts of water and land—in fact, nearly half of the water and 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States are used to raise animals for food. Our taste for meat is also taking a toll on our supply of fuel and other nonrenewable resour
ces—about one-third of the raw materials used in America each year is consumed by the farmed animal industry. Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States, and since factory farms don't have sewage treatment systems as our cities and towns do, this concentrated slop ends up polluting our water, destroying our topsoil, and contaminating our air. Eating meat produces 100 percent of this waste—about 86,000 pounds per second! Give up animal products, and you'll be responsible for none of it.From the Green Left:
The shift to grain-fed livestock is being driven by the wealthy nations' demands for fat-marbled meat. Currently, 70% of the US's entire grain crop is fed to livestock. Furthermore, two thirds of all the grain exported by the US goes to feed livestock rather than people. In the countries of the European Community, 57% of grain is fed to livestock. Brazil, a major producer of beef for the North American markets, now feeds 55% of its grain to livestock. Worldwide, between 1988-1990, humans consumed 822 million tonnes of grain, while livestock consumed 642 million tonnes. (New Internationalist, May, 1995).
More than half of Latin America's beef production is exported, with the rest priced beyond the range of most. From 1960 to 1980, beef exports from El Salvador increased more than 600%. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of small farmers were pushed off their land. Today, 72% of all Salvadoran infants are underfed. In Guatemala 75% of children under five years of age are undernourished, while much of the land and other resources for food production is given over to producing meat. Yet every year Guatemala exports 20 million kilos of meat to the United States. Robbins suggests that "If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10%, enough grain would be saved to feed 60 million people ... about the number of people worldwide who die of hunger-related disease every year. Of course, this doesn't mean world hunger would be solved simply if Americans ate 10% less meat, there are obviously enormous economic, social, and political realities to be faced."
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"The elimination of beef will be accompanied by an ecological renaissance, a grand restoration of nature on every continent ... Countless species of plants, insects and animals will be granted a reprieve from what once appeared to be a sure death at the hands of cattle ranchers and multinational corporations." Current agricultural practices are unsustainable. The planet is losing 24 million tons of top soil every year and the biologically productive land area is shrinking. Acid rain, soil erosion, ozone layer depletion, air pollution, the extinction of species, water loss, and many other environmental degradations are steadily decreasing the world's food producing capacity.
As you can see, our insistence on eating meat is a recipe for disaster for the majority of the world. A meat based diet requires 7 times more land than a plant based diet (more info). As the globalization of Western culture continues, more people in more countries are moving to an animal b
ased diet, which is using up even more resources. There are no longer any reasons to cling to a meat based diet; a plant based diet has been proven to be better for your health, the environment, and the global community as a whole. Plant based diets free up valuable resources, among them water, (droughts have been a major issue leading up to the current crisis) and are better for the health of the soil.As for bio-fuels, a more plausible solution to oil dependency would be to reduce consumption. This means: using public transportation or your bicycle, not driving to somewhere you could easily walk to, not flying short distances, carpooling, driving in a way that conserves fuel, buying local produce, etc. It's interesting that even as in recent years much talk of "reducing dependency on foreign oil" has been heard, people have been buying gas-guzzling SUVs. It's time to connect the dots! A car in itself is not as fuel efficient as public transportation, and more people with less fuel-efficient cars = higher dependency on oil.
We need to take responsibility for what's happening. Many of the problems are due to bad policy, but there is A LOT that we can do as individuals to make a positive change in the world. Making conscious decisions is the most important thing that we can do - we have to realize that nowhere is an island anymore, and the choices we make have global repercussions.
Thanks for reading!
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