Courtesy of ADAAPT
by Gary Yourofsky
Meat-eating societies are the main cause of world hunger because they feed a disproportionate percentage of the world’s crops to the more than 50 billion land animals raised for food annually, and tens of billions of marine animals (yes, we have fish farms nowadays)—instead of 6.5 billion people on the planet! Do the math. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out this equation. Every 2-3 seconds some human (most likely a child) starves to death, while pigs and cows continually get fat. Even the Council for Agriculture Science and Technology, a group comprised of people involved in animal agriculture, acknowledges that 10 billion people could be fed with the available crop land in America if everyone became vegan. One acre of land can yield 30,000 pounds of carrots, 40,000 pounds of potatoes or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes. However, one acre of land can yield only 250 pounds of meat. Why? Depending on the animal in question, it takes from three to twenty pounds of vegetable protein to create one pound of animal protein. Thus it has been said in many places that animal agriculture works like “a protein factory in reverse.” However, not only does this process squander protein resources; it obliterates carbohydrates and fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and many other nutrients altogether.
Jeremy Rifkin, a widely respected author on issues of worldwide food supply, traces the occurrences of famine directly to our increasing tendency to use precious food resources as animal feed. In his editorial piece There’s a Bone to Pick with Meat Eaters, published in the Los Angeles Times in May 2002, Rifkin states that 36 percent of all the world’s grains are fed to food animals; in the U.S. the number is a staggering 70 percent. (Keep in mind that the worldwide number is now eight years old as of this writing; the current number for worldwide grains being fed to animals is now 65 percent!) In emerging nations such as China, Egypt, Mexico and Thailand, the portion of arable land used to grow animal feed has increased since 1950 between threefold and thirtyfold, depending on the country. An acre of cereal produces five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production; an acre of legumes (beans, peas, lentils) can produce 10 times more protein; leafy vegetables, 15 times more protein. (Please click the link above to read the entire article.)
In his groundbreaking book The Food Revolution, John Robbins observes that producing surplus amounts of grain in the U.S. frequently results in obscenely unjust exchanges of food resources that take place between the U.S. and many Latin American countries, for example. If soybeans, vegetables and grains were fed directly to humans, instead of to animals whose lives were forced into existence in any event, we could alleviate much world hunger by putting an end to these unjust transactions. (Read the relevant excerpt from Robbins’ book here.)
It’s no accident that many of the same factors that make animal-based agriculture an environmental disaster also make it disastrous when it comes to feeding the world’s human populations. As the previous section has noted, sustaining a carnivorous culture requires twenty times more land, fourteen times more water, and from ten to twenty times more consumption of fossil fuels and other energy sources, than would be required to sustain a purely vegan culture of the same size. (It’s also worth noting that the American people—the most wasteful culture on the planet—comprise less than five percent of the world’s population, yet they consume 20 percent of the world’s animals raised for food.) Animal agriculture is not only evil to the animals that it imprisons, enslaves, tortures, and kills; it is monumentally evil when we consider the harm it wreaks on the natural environment and the health of individual persons, its devastating impact on health-care systems all over the world, and finally, its exacerbating effects on world famine and hunger. GO VEGAN! It’s simply the right thing to do.
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Gary Yourofsky is NIO’s Senior Editor of Vegan Education. Founder of ADAPTT (Animals Deserve Absolute Protection Today and Tomorrow). Yourofsky uses his notoriety (including 13 arrests, a mink liberation in Canada in ‘97, and banishment from five countries) to reach tens of thousands of students through approximately 250 engagements annually in public schools and universities across the country. He uses thought-provoking prose, inspiring stories, indisputable facts, quotes from Pythagoras, William Ralph Inge and other great thinkers, plus graphic footage from slaughterhouses (land and sea), to ask people to be kind to animals and, ultimately, go vegan. Please visit Gary’s website: ADAPTT.
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