The reasons are blindingly obvious - political lobbying by livestock interests that dwarfs even that of the tobacco industry and a terror of losing supporters and donations by the environmental groups.
It can’t go on and a recent report by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation (Livestock’s Long Shadow) shows in terrifying detail why meat and dairy eaters are literally devouring the Earth! A couple of its opening statements spell out just how desperate the situation has become: “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from global to local.” And: “Livestock’s contribution is on a massive scale...The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”
What lies at the heart of this devastation is the inherent inefficiency of meat and dairy consumption. It takes 17 kg of good-quality vegetable protein to produce 1 kg of beef protein. It’s much the same with other meats to a lesser degree.
The outcome is that livestock now demand 70 per cent of all the world’s agricultural land and the supply of new land has run out. The resulting pressure on existing agricultural land through overgrazing and intensification with chemical fertilisers and dangerous pesticides - land pushed beyond its natural ability to cope - has spurred the spread of deserts. One third of the world’s land is now degraded and has begun the relentless transition to desert.
Despite this, the meat industry is boasting of massive future growth as they and the pharmaceutical industries encourage the developing world to adopt Western eating habits and provide the hardware, chemicals and capital to facilitate it.
There are only two ways to produce this growth - devastate what remains of the rainforests and other wilderness areas and increase the rate of intensification. Already 80 per cent of the world’s farmed animals are condemned to the cruel obscenity of factory farms and the figure is set to increase.
Already livestock are the main cause of rainforest devastation with 70 per cent of cleared Amazon land being used for cattle grazing, with almost all the remainder used for growing soya beans for animal fodder. Eighteen million tons of the stuff is imported into Europe annually. Just about every piece of fried chicken, slice of bacon, sausage or hamburger contributes to rainforest devastation.
Because of the rich diversity of species in these extraordinary places, livestock producers can also claim responsibility for being the primary cause of biodiversity loss - the annihilation of plant and animal species.
Sadly, the devastation doesn’t stop there. Livestock producers have poisoned the environment at every level - land, sea and air - with their fertilisers and pesticides, animal wastes and antibiotics. Holding primary responsibility for the creation of anti-biotic-resistant superbugs, this pervasive polluting descends even to a microbiological level.
Entirely new diseases are emerging as a direct result of cramming weak and dejected animals into factory farms and then dosing them with a battery of drugs, pesticides and fungicides in order to keep them alive. If and when bird flu arrives, we can thank intensive livestock farming for it. Even if it never materialises, something else will, such is the nature of these hothouses of microbiological mutation.
There are far more concerns than these but each one of the problems I have mentioned has the potential to devastate humankind. And then, of course, we have global warming. Such has been the official silence that you may not even be aware of livestock’s contribution. They produce 18 per cent of all global warming gases - carbon dioxide from production and processing, methane from animals’ digestive systems and nitrous oxide from manure.
What is it the government has decided to target as the unacceptable face of capitalism? Aircraft! The aircraft industry accounts for three per cent of global warming while livestock are responsible for more gases than all the transport systems in the world combined - cars, boats, ships, trains and, yes, planes! Their effect is even more pernicious than this as their degradation of soil and destruction of rainforests and other bio masses is actively reducing the globe’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
The government’s reaction is to continue with massive subsidies to meat and dairy farmers to keep prices artificially low and encourage consumption.
You, of course, don’t have to wait for government action and can remove yourself from this insane cycle overnight simply by changing your diet. If these developing crises are to be effectively managed, giving up meat and dairy can only be a first step in a drastic reduction in consumption. As the whole globe now functions on increasing consumption you start to get some idea of the political battle that lies ahead.
Tony Wardle is associate director of the vegan campaign group Viva! and author of the recently published report on the environment, Diet of Disaster. It can be viewed online at www.viva.org.uk or bought for £3.50 from Viva! on 0117 944 1000.
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