vegan/BeyondBeefBello.html

ITMFA

It's long past time - impeach Bush and Cheney

This just in...

Navigation

Active forum topics

What's up. Doc?

From our old vegetarian information file archives. (Please note that web links inside this document may be broken.)

From wheeler@super.org Wed Feb 24 17:53:57 1993 Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 10:34:35 EDT From: wheeler@super.org (Ferrell S. Wheeler) To: tms@cs.umd.edu Subject: BB/OPED Bello OP-ED 4 Beyond Beef Campaign 1130 17th St., NW Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20036 Tel: 202-775-1132 Fax: 202-775-0074 Cows Eat Better Than People Do By Dr. Walden Bello, Executive Director, Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, CA Every time you eat a hamburger you are having a relationship with thousands of people you never met. Not just people at the supermarket or fast food restaurant but possibly World Bank officials in Washington, D.C., and peasants from Central and South America. And many of these peopple are hungry. The fact is that there is enough food in the world for everyone. But tragically, much of the world's food and land resources are tied up in produciing beef and other livestock -- food for the well-off -- while millions of children and adults suffer from malnutrition and starvation. The mathematics are simple. For every pound of feed-lot beef on our plates, an American cow eats nine pounds of grain and soy feed. In the 1980's, the world grain supply alone was enough to provide every human on the planet with 3,600 calories a day -- more than enough to meet everyone's average nutritional requirements. As Frances Moore Lappe, author of _Diet for a Small Planet_, explains, "Our food system takes abundant grain, which hungry people can't afford, and shrinks it into meat, which better-off people will pay for." Cattle and other livestock eat 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States. We may think that U.S. grain exports feed the hungry around the world. But in reality, three-fourths of the corn, barley, sorghum, and oats imported by poor countries goes to feed animals. How can it be true that people are hungry -- even starving -- while an abundance of food is produced? The problem is not scarcity of food, but that cows often eat better than people do. It all depends on how meat is produced. Livestock, such as chickens and pigs, raised on kitchen scraps and other waste, can supplement a poor family's diet by converting inedible materials into meat and eggs. Livestock raised by small farmers who rotate pasture with food crops can improve soil fertility while raising livestock for additional home consumption or market income. Paradoxically, however, grain-fed meat and meat raised through extensive farming on land that used to be accessible to peasants and small farmers to produce subsistence and market crops can create hunger while it creates food. In Central America, staple crop production has been replaced by extensive cattle ranching, which now occupies two-thirds of the arable land. The World Bank encouraged the switch-over by dumping cattle credit into the region, with an eye toward expanding U.S. fast-food and frozen-dinner markets. The resulting expansion of cattle ranching has deprived peasants of access to the land they depend on for growing food. And because of ranching's limited ability to create jobs (cattle ranching creates thirteen times fewer jobs per acre than coffee production), rural hunger has soared. Concentrating on Central America's "comparative advantage" in cattle exports has not created the kind of economic growth that can end hunger. Poor people, deprived of land on which to grow food and without adequate income to buy imported food, are not the ones who benefit from beef exports. In parts of Mexico and South America, beef production is linked to increasing poverty in a different way -- the switch-over form growing food crops to feed crops. In Brazil, half of the basic grains produced are sold as livestock feed, while the majority of the rural poor suffer >from malnutrition. The shift from black beans, a basic food crop, to soy beans feeds the beef appetites of the Brazilian elites and foreign importers of Brazillian livestock feed, not Brazil's hungry masses. A study by David Barkin of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City found that in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Venezuela, production of meat for the rich has crowded out basic food production for the poor. What does all this have to do with our hamburgers? The American fast-food diet and the meat-eating habits of the wealthy around the world, support a world food system that diverts food resources from the hungry. But we do not have to unknowingly go along for the ride. Choosing to eat a diet lower on the food chain is a way of rejecting our position at the top of what environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin calls the "protein ladder." A diet higher in whole grains and legumes and lower in beef and other meat is not just healthier for ouselves, but also contributes to changing the world system that feeds some people and leaves others hungry. That is why we at Food First are joining the Beyond Beef campaign to encourage Americans to eat less beef and other meat. [Stephanie Rosenfeld, a research associate with Food First, contributed to this article.]