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Hungry for meat!
Starving!
The Environment!
Suggested reading
Hungry for Meat!
 
As well as costing the lives of millions of animals each year, meat production is causing human starvation throughout the world. Because over half the world's cereal harvest is fed to livestock being reared for slaughter, men, women and children are going hungry. It takes a full 3 kg of grain to produce just 1 kg of poultry, or 10 kg of grain to yield a mere 1 kg of intensively reared beef.

It's a shameful waste of resources. The more people who go vegetarian, the more the agricultural industry - and it is an industry these days, as mechanical as any other - will be forced to reassess its methods of operation and reduce its swollen meat production as demand dwindles.
Starving!
 
A third of the world's population is starving, 15 million children die every year because of malnutrition, yet this planet could supply ample food for everyone.

The problem is mismanagement - resulting in a huge waste of resources. Ten acres of land (that's about five football fields) will support:
  • 61 people on a diet of soya beans
  • 24 people on a diet of wheat
  • 10 people on a diet of maize
  • 2 people on a diet of cattle meat.
At least ten times as many people can be supported on a cereal diet compared with the number that can be supported on a meat-based diet. When the diet is based on soya products, the comparison rockets to 30 times as many people.

New Zealand alone could support an increase in population of more than 1000 percent if everyone was on a plant-based diet.

Countries like Ethiopia and India grow their own grain. Developed countries continually take food from the Third World where it is needed, and feed it to their livestock.
The Environment
 
Tropical rainforest produces most of the oxygen we breathe. Yet right now large multinational companies are clearing vast areas for cattle ranching - cattle that are the basic ingredient of beefburgers!

Forests are destroyed, cattle reared and slaughtered, and the land left infertile. When the forest goes, it goes for good, and it's going fast. Every minute of every day, 100 acres of rainforest is devastated and disappears, reducing the Earth's oxygen supply.

The East Cape of the North Island provides a prime example of what happens when land is cleared for animal production (sheep farming in this case). Erosion is widespread in the area, with many landslides and gouges on the hillsides. Floods are a regular occurrence. The government is now planning to reforest the area.

Meat production is more than killing animals, it's suicide!
Suggested Reading
 
Diet For A Small Planet by Francis Moore Lappe
Why You Don't Need Meat by Peter Cox
Compassion - The Ultimate Ethic by Victoria Moran
Organic Gardening by Lawrence D. Hills
The Poisoned Earth by Nigel Dudley
Winds of Change by J. Gribbin & M. Kelly

Think about the consequences of meat production. Is it worth ruining our planet for?

 
   
   This website is administered by the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand Vegetarian Society