In the battle to raise money for global poverty and famine, Comic Relief does a tremendous job. Unfortunately, you’ll be lucky to hear the word vegetarianism mentioned despite the essential contribution it can make to ending starvation – as Viva!’s new guide, Feed the World, makes clear
Red Noses…
Red Faces
Hunger is a massive problem and one third of the world’s population does not have enough to eat. And the future looks bleak, with the global population set to rise from 6.1 billion to 9.3 billion by 2050. Severe food shortages and famine on an unprecedented scale are the predicted outcome. Few people realise that this misery is directly related to meat consumption.
There is the increasing obscenity of children in the developing world starving next to fields of fodder destined for export as animal feed to the rich world. If animal farming was to end and the land used to grow food for humans, every person on the planet could be fed. An area the size of five football pitches (10 hectares) will grow enough meat to feed two people, maize to feed 10, wheat to feed 24 or soya to feed 61.
A Western, meat-based diet uses four-and-a-half times more land than is necessary for a vegan diet and two-and-a-quarter more than for a vegetarian diet. Even the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) now recommends that people reduce their intake of dairy and meat products.
The developing world has not always been hungry. During the industrial revolution, European countries needed raw materials which they took through invasion and colonisation. They claimed the land as their own, making indigenous people pay taxes or rent for what had been theirs by right. They were forced to grow crops such as cotton to sell to their new masters who now owned the land and dictated the price they would pay.
Colonisation has ended but the land in poorer countries is still largely not owned by those who work on it and the demand is still for cash crops for export, such as animal feed. It reduces the amount of food grown for home consumption and removes any hope of paying off crippling national debts – foreign loans frequently made to corrupt dictators for military expenditure.Fifty-two of the world’s poorest countries owe the West some £213 billion!
Drought and other natural disasters are often wrongly blamed as the cause of famine. In fact most are man made and the primary underlying cause is neo-colonialism and the demands that meat production makes on world food supplies.
Currently, farmed animals eat one-third of the world’s total cereal production. In the industrialised world, two-thirds of agricultural land produces cereals for animal feed. This huge amount of food does not convert directly into meat as most is either excreted or used as fuel to keep the animal alive. For every 10 kilograms of soya protein fed to America’s cattle, only one kilogram is converted to meat. Almost the entire population of India and China could be fed on the protein consumed and largely wasted by the USA’s beef herd.
We now have the obscene situation where people are forced to go hungry so that the West can gorge itself on meat – ironically a food which is killing its people with diseases such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Eating meat is not the only reason for world hunger but it is a major one and vegetarianism, by using far less of the world’s resources, is part of the remedy. Come on Lenny, go veggie and embarrass a few million others into joining you. That way you’ll help the starving every day of the year.
Copies of Viva!’s colourful, 20-page Feed the World guide are available from Viva! for just £1.50 (inc p&p). See page 27 for details of our other guides.
Contact Viva! 8 York Court,
Wilder Street, Bristol BS2 8QH
Tel: 0117 944 1000. E: info@viva.org.uk or shop online at www.viva.org.uk