Veganism and the Environment
"Three in four of the world’s new or emerging infectious diseases come from animals.
Responsible for three million deaths a year, these diseases are largely transmitted through
trading wildlife (legally and illegally) and factory farming."
Viva! 'Zoonotic diseases – 3 in 4'.
|
Anti-vegans, in a futile attempt to justify their habit and deflect attention away from themselves, sometimes claim that even in Veganism, there is loss of life in the use of land.
Firstly, it’s impossible to live in this world without causing some harm and this is recognised in the definition of veganism. However, anyone concerned about “crop deaths” should be vegan.
Secondly, non-vegans are responsible for the deaths of those animals associated with the plant foods and plant products they eat (vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, rice, pasta, bread etc.).
Thirdly, non-vegans are responsible for the deaths of those animals associated with the animals and animal products they consume. More crops are grown to feed farmed animals than humans.
Source:
https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/nature-food/45159/majority-of-european-crops-feeding-animals-and-cars-not-people/ and
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
Fourthly, in a vegan world, far less agricultural land would be required: "In the hypothetical scenario in which the entire world adopted a vegan diet the researchers estimate that our total agricultural land use would shrink from 4.1 billion hectares to 1 billion uhectares. A reduction of 75%. That’s equal to an area the size of North America and Brazil combined."
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Finally, in addition to the above, non-vegans are responsible for contributing to the annual needless suffering and death of an estimated 80 billion farmed animals and 2.5 trillion aquatic animals, together with the deaths associated with the devastating environmental and ecological impacts of animal agriculture and commercial fishing. Incidentally, one third of the annual global ocean fish catch is used to feed farmed animals.
Source:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fish-food-idUSTRE49S0XH20081029
In sum, non-vegans are demonstrably responsible for vastly more deaths than vegans.
Incredibly, some anti-vegans claim that more animals are killed through vegans pursuing their plant-based diets. They appear to simply repeat "what they've heard," or if they have
read it, it's from an article written by someone with no academic knowledge of the subject in some questionable libertarian periodical. An excellent article refuting this nonsense is 'Debunked: Do vegans kill more animals through crop deaths?'. Accessible here: https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/debunked-do-vegans-kill-more-animals-through-crop-deaths
A highly informative paper entitled 'How planting crops used to feed livestock is contributing to habitat destruction' states:
"Approximately 70 billion farm animals are being raised for food annually. In 2015, people in the U.S. consumed 24.8 billion pounds of beef, with the majority of that cattle being raised in massive feedlots. Those cattle, in addition to other feedlot animals like chickens and pigs, are consuming 70 percent of the grain grown in the U.S.
According to the USDA’s website, corn, barley, oats, and sorghum are used as major feed grains in the U.S., with corn 'accounting for more than 95 percent of total feed grain and production use.' In the U.S., 36 percent of corn crops being used to feed livestock. Soy is also commonly used in feed, with 75 percent of global soybean crops being fed to livestock. To support these crops, one-third of arable land being used for feed production globally, using vast amounts of land and water resources."
Source: https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/livestock-feed-and-habitat-destruction/
Earth use:
* "Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. More than three-quarters of this is used for livestock production, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world’s protein and calorie supply."
Source:
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
* "A startling UK map showing how much we use land for animal agriculture" (map provided)
Source:
https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2022/1/31/animal-agriculture-crowding-out-solar
* "Researchers ran hundreds of food production simulations under different conditions—like organic versus high-yield farming, and plant-based versus meat-based diets. They recorded whether each combination of strategies was "feasible"—whether enough food could be produced to feed the estimated 2050 world population without expanding the area of farmland people already use. Diet was the biggest determinant of success, the team reports today in Nature Communications. Of the scenarios that included everyone in the world eating a diet consisting entirely of plants, 100% were feasible. But because of the amount of land it takes to raise animals for meat—about twice as much as for crops—only 15% of the scenarios with typical meat-heavy Western diets were feasible.
Source:
https://www.science.org/content/article/veganism-could-save-world-new-study-argues
"How can we grow enough food to feed a skyrocketing population, while still leaving some room for nature? To find out, researchers ran hundreds of food production simulations under different conditions—like organic versus high-yield farming, and plant-based versus meat-based diets. They recorded whether each combination of strategies was "feasible"—whether enough food could be produced to feed the estimated 2050 world population without expanding the area of farmland people already use. Diet was the biggest determinant of success, the team reports today in Nature Communications. Of the scenarios that included everyone in the world eating a diet consisting entirely of plants, 100% were feasible. But because of the amount of land it takes to raise animals for meat—about twice as much as for crops—only 15% of the scenarios with typical meat-heavy Western diets were feasible. No other factor had that large of an effect, not even switching to farming practices like extra fertilizer use to make land more productive."
Source:
"https://www.science.org/content/article/veganism-could-save-world-new-study-argues
"Livestock farming has a vast environmental footprint. It contributes to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, acid rain, coral reef degeneration and deforestation.
Nowhere is this impact more apparent than climate change – livestock farming contributes 18% of human produced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This is more than all emissions from ships, planes, trucks, cars and all other transport put together.
Climate change alone poses multiple risks to health and well-being through increased risk of extreme weather events – such as floods, droughts and heatwaves – and has been described as the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century.
Meat production is highly inefficient – this is particularly true when it comes to red meat. To produce one kilogram of beef requires 25 kilograms of grain – to feed the animal – and roughly 15,000 litres of water. Pork is a little less intensive and chicken less still. The scale of the problem can also be seen in land use: around 30% of the earth’s land surface is currently used for livestock farming. Since food, water and land are scarce in many parts of the world, this represents an inefficient use of resources.
Feeding grain to livestock increases global demand and drives up grain prices, making it harder for the world’s poor to feed themselves. Grain could instead be used to feed people, and water used to irrigate crops. If all grain were fed to humans instead of animals, we could feed an extra 3.5 billion people. In short, industrial livestock farming is not only inefficient but also not equitable.
At the production level, industrial livestock farming relies heavily on antibiotic use to accelerate weight gain and control infection – in the US, 80% of all antibiotics are consumed by the livestock industry. This contributes to the growing public health problem of antibiotic resistance. Already, more than 23,000 people are estimated to die every year in the US alone from resistant bacteria. As this figure continues to rise, it becomes hard to overstate he threat of this emerging crisis."
Source:
https://theconversation.com/five-ways-the-meat-on-your-plate-is-killing-the-planet-76128
"Our current food system, and its future trajectory, is simply not sustainable, and we need to fundamentally change the way we produce food if we are to feed 9-10bn people in 2050 without wrecking the planet irreversibly.' Those words were written by Pete Smith, Professor of Soils and Global Change at the University of Aberdeen, but they could have been written by any of the hundreds of people who have been researching the sustainability of our food habits during the last 20 years...
If we continue to try to meet that demand for food from animals, the damage will be catastrophic. The root of the problem is the sheer inefficiency of pastoral farming. It takes between five and 10kgs of grain to produce one kilogram of beef. That inefficiency shows itself in the massive amounts of land given over to crops like soya, which is fed to cattle. It is estimated that animal farming is responsible for 80 per cent of global deforestation, and, a recent World Wildlife Report says, “60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.” With regard to water, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has calculated that it takes over 15,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of beef, while the relevant figure for 1kg of potatoes is 287. As water becomes an increasingly rare and precious resource, we cannot afford to waste it with such recklessness."
Source:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/40985/why-the-government-should-encourage-veganism
"Research conducted since Livestock’s Long Shadow has found that of all the habitable land on the planet, 45% is used for factory farming and pastures (Animal Equality 2015); 15% more than originally reported by the UN. It has also been reported that the original GHGE statistic of 18% annually is far from accurate. Goodland and Anhang (2009) found “livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least […] 51% of annual worldwide GHG emissions” (p. 11). The low figure may have been generated because sources of GHGE in animal agriculture are “underestimated, some are simply overlooked” (Goodland and Anhang 2009, p. 11). It is also estimated that 70 billion animals are produced for food annually (Compassion in World Faming 2013; Animal Equality 2015). Thus, animal agriculture, it would appear, “is fundamentally unsustainable” (Compassion in World Farming 2013, p. 5).
MSc Leanne Cooper, University of Aberdeen.
A New Veganism: How Climate Change Has Created More Vegans, (p,18)
"In 2012, livestock and poultry on the largest concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) produced 369 million tons of manure: this was almost 13 times more waste than that of the entire US population of 312 million. While human waste is treated in municipal sewer systems and subject to strict regulation, animal waste is stored in open ponds (called lagoons) or pits and is applied untreated as fertilizer to farm fields. The mixture in lagoons consists not only of animal excrement but of bedding waste, antibiotic residues, cleaning solutions and other chemicals, and sometimes dead animals. Most lagoons are lined only with clay and can leak, allowing the waste to seep into groundwater...
In 2015, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, created by runoff from manure and other agricultural fertilizer in the Mississippi floodplain, was more than 5,000 square miles: this is the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. 3 Application of animal waste from CAFOs can also be a cause of environmental heavy metal contamination (stemming from metals used in feed), including copper, zinc and lead...
Untreated waste at CAFOs also pollutes the air with odors and creates health problems, markedly decreasing the quality of life of workers, people nearby and neighboring communities and property values. Two significant pollutants are potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, along with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and other noisome chemicals. CAFOs release large amounts of particulates; in especially dry regions where manure turns easily into dust, the particulate matter is rapidly dispersed. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that nearly three quarters of the country’s ammonia pollution comes from livestock facilities, and studies have found high levels of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant genes in air samples downwind of feedlots."
Source:
https://foodprint.org/issues/what-happens-to-animal-waste/
"The world now produces more than four times the quantity of meat it did fifty years ago. In the United States, it is estimated that 70% of cows, 98% of pigs, 99% of turkeys, and 98% of chickens and eggs come from factory farms, according to a 2017 USDA report. And all of these factory farms have a tremendously detrimental impact on both our land availability and soil health. Industrialized livestock production uses a significant amount of land surface – 26% of the Earth’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing, and one-third of the planet’s arable (farmable) land is occupied by crops for livestock feed, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
When comparing global land use of a meat-based diet to a plant-based diet, industrialized livestock grazing and growing livestock feed (primarily corn, soy, and oats) uses two and a half times more land than a plant-based diet. In the U.S., more than 70% of soy, 80% of corn, and 95% of oats that are grown are fed to livestock. Consuming a plant-based diet isn’t just a more efficient use of limited land resources, but also reduces the numerous negative impacts industrialized livestock production has on soil health. We explore some of these negative effects below."
Source:
https://populationeducation.org/industrialized-meat-production-and-land-degradation-3-reasons-to-shift-to-a-plant-based-diet/
"Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment found that 53 percent of all plant protein being grown in the world is fed to animals. This plant protein, which could go to starving people around the world, is used to feed animals. These animals don’t produce as many calories as the original plant protein would have. It takes about 13 pounds of grain to create a pound of meat. A lot more people can be fed with 13 pounds of grain than one pound of meat.
The more people who transition to a vegan diet, the more awareness is called to this issue."
Source:
https://ffl.org/articles/veganism-positive-effects/
"Switching en masse to a plant-based diet is essential to protect wildlife habitats and prevent the loss of numerous species currently facing extinction, according to a new report...But what happens next to the world’s endangered wildlife populations rests in human hands, and the rise in popularity of plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products offers hope for the future."
Source:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/plant-based-diet-biodiversity-report/
"In 2018, scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage of farming to the planet found avoiding meat and dairy products was the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet. The research showed that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world."
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/apr/25/going-vegan-can-switching-to-a-plant-based-diet-really-save-the-planet
"Poor air quality is the largest environmental health risk in the United States and worldwide, and agriculture is a major source of air pollution. Nevertheless, air quality has been largely absent from discussions about the health and environmental impacts of food. We estimate the air quality–related health impacts of agriculture in the United States, finding that 80% of the 15,900 annual deaths that result from food-related fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution are attributable to animal-based foods.
Source:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2013637118
"Meat production is one of the largest contributors to global warming and environmental degradation. The livestock sector is responsible for about 15% of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGE), while also driving deforestation, land degradation, and biodiversity loss...Moreover, high consumption of animal products, particularly red meat and processed meat, also negatively affects human health. There is increasing evidence that high intakes of processed meat, and to a lesser extent red meat, lead to an increased risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and some forms of cancer. WHO has classified processed meat as a carcinogen and red meat as a probable carcinogen to humans."
Source:
https://www.thelancet.com
"Although often overlooked in conversations about climate change, animal agriculture is a major driver of global warming and biodiversity loss. As we will see below, the industry destroys ecosystems, releases huge quantities of greenhouse gases, wastes vast amounts of water, and is a major source of pollutants.
While people around the world are planting trees to help the planet, meat companies are destroying ancient forests to make room for cattle ranching and soy production. Soy is often associated with vegans and vegetarians, but 77 percent of the crop is actually fed to farmed animals—primarily chickens and pigs. Beef production alone is to blame for 41 percent of global deforestation, equal to more than two million hectares of land per year, and 72 percent of deforestation in Brazil. The flesh of cattle who were raised on deforested land ends up on supermarket shelves around the world. Of almost 80,000 tonnes of beef that the U.S. imports from Brazil each year, 55 percent has been linked to the severely deforested Cerrado savanna..
Not only does deforestation cause ecological devastation, but it is also a human rights issue due to land-grabbing. Cattle ranchers and soy producers threaten, violently attack, and steal land from Indigenous peoples."
Source:
https://www.newrootsinstitute.org/articles/animal-agriculture-environment
"Every year an estimated 2.5 billion tonnes of food goes to waste globally, accounting for around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This wasted food takes an area of land roughly the size of China and India combined, to grow. Nowhere in our food supply chain is the amount of waste greater and more damaging than in the industrial production of meat. It is estimated that a staggering 153 million tonnes of meat are wasted at the farm level every year. Coupled with horrifically high livestock mortality rates caused by poor standards of animal husbandry, among other factors, this waste represents not only a moral catastrophe but an environmental disaster. And this is only one part of the problem...Currently, more than one-third of the calories produced by the world’s crops are being used for animal feed, and only 12 percent of those feed calories ultimately contribute to the human diet (as meat and other animal products). Producing 1kg of beef, for example, requires roughly 8kg of feed. With such low returns, does it still make sense for humanity to invest in livestock production?
...About two-thirds of livestock are raised in factory farms...When possible, replacing animal-based foods with more resource-efficient plant alternatives can boost food availability by reallocating production resources from feed to human food. With around 800 million people experiencing hunger globally, we can’t afford to continue food production that only exacerbates the engulfed nutrition security, climate, environmental and health crises."
Source:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/12/16/cop-out-no-more-we-can-no-longer-ignore-the-wast
"Eighty-five per cent of the land that feeds the UK is committed to animal agriculture. A government-commissioned food strategy by Henry Dimbleby last year found that for a sustainable future, this has to be reduced, leading to a 30% cut in the average amount of meat consumption. Intensive and excessive animal agriculture leads to carbon emissions as well as pollution and the degradation of nature. It also uses an amount of land found by experts to be unsustainable."
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/05/ministers-run-scared-of-targeting-meat-consumption-in-land-use-strategy
"A recent study by the University of Oxford in the UK shows that veganism, compared to diets high in meat consumption, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 75%, and contributes to reduced water pollution and soil depletion. The study also indicates that veganism cuts the loss of wildlife by 66% and reduces water consumption by as much as 54%. This is yet another report that has been published in recent weeks...which indicates that a switch to a plant-based diet is essential in dealing with today’s and tomorrow’s crises associated with the current food system, which is unsustainable.
The results of the study were published as part of an article in Nature Food on 20 July 2023, and the study’s leader himself, Professor Peter Scarborough of Oxford University, stressed that reducing the amount of meat and dairy in the diet could have a big impact on the food footprint we produce."
Source:
https://en.futurefood4climate.eu/science-says-veganism-will-save-the-world/
"* Globally 83% of Agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, producing only 18% of food calories consumed.
* 60% of agricultural land worldwide is used for beef production, producing only 2% of food calories consumed.
* 1,103.4 million tonnes of animal feed were produced globally in 2018. This could feed 5.6 billion people, basically eliminating hunger...
* According to Greenpeace: “Animal agriculture accounted for 12 – 17% of the EU’s GHG emissions in 2013.
* Agricultural emissions are dominated by methane (CH4), mainly attributable to cattle and sheep enteric fermentation, with the remainder attributable to manure management in liquid manure systems.
* Globally agriculture directly contributes about 15–23% of all GHG emissions. If we include all food system processes and food waste then the total contribution is 29%...
* Factory farms also contribute to air pollution, which authorities consider the single largest environmental health risk in Europe, causing over 400,000 premature deaths per year...
* Rainforests are being cut down in order to create pasture for cattle grazing operations and to grow soy for animal feed. 90% of the planet’s soy crop is used for animal feed...
* 76% of antibiotics worldwide are given to animals. Diseases can spread easily between animals reared in intensive farms, due to the lack of space and close confinement. Their immune systems are also suppressed due to these unnatural conditions...
* 75-90% of the antibiotics fed to animals are excreted un-metabolised and enter the environment and water sources. These antibiotics could then foster the emergence of microbial resistance in bacteria beyond those in an animal’s gut – including bacteria that may pose a greater risk to humans...
* Intensive livestock factory farms, with their high densities of confined animals, have been shown to increase the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. COVID-19, SARS, Mers, HIV/AIDS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Measles and many other viruses endemic in the human population originated in animals and then jumped to humans."
Source:
https://naturerising.ie/how-is-animal-farming-destructive-to-the-environment/
"Current trends in food production and consumption are considered unsustainable. The world’s population is expected to increase by two billion people in the next 30 years; from 7.7 billion currently, to 9.7 billion in 2050, according to the United Nations. Just satisfying the expected human food and animal feed demands would require increasing global food production by 70% Intensification with increased resource use simply will not produce enough to meet the huge demand. We need to find a different way to achieve global food security without expanding crop and pastureland and without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
A study evaluating the environmental impact of various diets found that 5-13% of the environmental impact of diet is due to land use changes. This includes deforestation as well as desertification arising from agricultural expansion for products not used to feed the local human population, but instead exported to developed countries as cattle feed. This makes no sense as increasing populations are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources. Around a billion people are currently chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems continue to degrade land, water, biodiversity and climate on a global scale. Europe can grow enough vegetable protein to feed all its people, but not all its farmed animals too. Only 20% of the protein fed to animals in Europe originates in Europe, the rest is imported from other countries, including developing ones, which plays an important role in the further impoverishment of these countries and the exploitation of their environmental resources. Not to mention the malnourishment of their populations.
Changing land use for livestock production is directly linked to deforestation. For the UK, when land use change emissions are considered, about a half the food chain emissions arise outside the UK. So, where your food comes from matters. Land use changes (mainly deforestation) driven by agricultural expansion is a major source of emissions attributable to global food production and the UK plays an important part. In a study conducted for the conducted for WWF-UK and the Food Climate Research Network, it was estimated that global land use change emissions account for 40% of the emissions embedded in food consumed in the UK. Deforestation is a large source of emissions and expansion of agriculture is the biggest driver. The world’s limited resources simply cannot keep pace with our hunger for animal-based foods."
Source:
https://viva.org.uk/planet/the-issues/land-use/
In November 2023, a Vegan information site directed attention to a statement made by the American Soybean Association: this said "More than 90% of U.S. soybeans produced are used as a high quality protein source for animal feed...97% of soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry".
https://soygrowers.com/key-issues-initiatives/key-issues/other/animal-ag/
"Approximately 18 billion animals killed for food end up being thrown away, according to a new study. Around a third of food produced globally ends up going to waste, either during production, transport, or by households and retailers. Researchers from Leiden University have calculated for the first time the animal cost embodied in waste across the whole food supply chain...The researchers calculate that cutting meat loss and waste to the lowest levels across the food supply chain globally could spare 7.9 billion animal lives. This would not affect how much meat humans consume. “The number of animal lives lost or wasted is huge but not surprising,” Laura Scherer, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences and one of the study’s authors, told
Plant Based News. “It is a result of the about 75 billion animals used for the production of the six meat types we considered.”...
Globally, food loss and waste accounts for 10 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But the study points out that wasted meat has a relatively bigger environmental impact than wasted plant-based foods. Wasted beef has a particularly big impact; it takes 100 times more land to produce a gram of protein from cows compared to peas or tofu. All animal products also use more of other resources like water and emit more GHGs than almost all plant foods. But when the number of animal lives lost through wastage are invisible, so too are their associated environmental costs, according to the researchers."
Source:
https://plantbasednews.org/animals/billions-of-animals-killed-for-food-end-up-in-bin/
"New data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) 2022 Census of Agriculture shows that 1.7 billion animals are currently being raised in U.S. factory farms every year – a 6 percent increase from 2016 and nearly a 50 percent increase from 20 years ago. The largest factory farms that are bad for farmers, the environment and public health keep growing in number,” Anne Schechinger, the Midwest director of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said in a statement. 'The USDA’s new data show that without policy changes, factory farms will continue to get bigger and bigger, wreaking havoc on public health, the environment and the climate.'
The U.S. currently has 24,000 factory farms, or concentrated animal feeding operations, that confine large numbers of animals in small spaces. It’s difficult to comprehend the staggering quantity of animals subjected to these inhumane conditions. The recent data from the USDA reveals that factory farms housing 500,000 or more broiler chickens churned out nearly 1.4 billion additional chickens in 2022 compared to 2012."
Source:
https://truthout.org/articles/u-s-factory-farm-animal-population-soars-by-50-percent-in-20-year-span/
U.S. Summary and State Data. Comprehensive summary of agricultural activity for the United States. Includes number of farms by size, etc.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/usv1.pdf
"A radical reduction in the amount of meat, dairy and other products sourced from animals is possible in the coming decades, as people turn to an increasing variety of alternatives. This would unlock vast amounts of land currently used to rear animals and to grow crops that feed them...
All this would free up huge amounts of land and water, since there would be less need for fields full of cows, chickens or pigs, or for crops grown to feed them. In our research, we estimated that fully replacing animal-sourced products would release more than 60% of the world’s agricultural land. Other researchers think as much as 75% might be released...
If 50% of animal products were replaced by 2050, that could release enough land for Beccs to generate as much electricity as coal power does today (about a third of the global total), while removing almost the same amount of carbon as coal currently emits. Alternatively, Beccs could produce around half the projected global hydrogen demand in 2050, with a similar amount of “negative emissions”.
Source:
https://theconversation.com/ditching-meat-could-release-vital-land-to-produce-energy-and-remove-carbon-from-the-atmosphere-new-study-222841
"Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk."
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/water-world-run-out-planet-hotter-looming-crisis
"For years, climate scientists have called for a phase-out of fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic global warming. Now, according to a first-of-its-kind survey of more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, we must also drastically reduce meat and dairy production — and fast."
Source:
https://www.vox.com/
"There is a simple, cost-effective and scientifically sound way to turn back the clock on global warming and reverse the catastrophic collapse of biodiversity: pay ranchers to raise trees instead of cattle. By mass, the world’s 1.7 billion cows are the dominant animal species on Earth, far outweighing the human population, and outweighing all the wild terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians left on Earth by more than 15-fold. More than a third of Earth’s land is used to feed livestock...Our peer-reviewed research estimated the climate impact of reduced emissions from livestock and recovery of plant biomass on the land they occupy. It showed that a global phaseout of animal agriculture over 15 years would unlock “negative emissions” sufficient to bring about an urgently needed 30-year window of “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions – even if all other emissions continued on their current trajectory. Such a phaseout would offset more than two-thirds of all projected carbon dioxide emissions over the next 80 years, and provide more than half of the net emissions reductions required to keep global temperatures from exceeding 2C above pre-industrial levels"
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/02/cattle-trees-climate-change-solution
"The Stern Report discussed the effect of global warming on the world economy. They said cutting greenhouse gas emissions would cost a lot of money (about 1% of the world’s GDP), but doing nothing will cost the world a lot more, anything from five-20 times more. They warned that we face losing up to a fifth of the world’s wealth from unmitigated climate change that if unchecked, will devastate the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the 20th century’s world wars. Written more than a decade ago, the report said: “So prompt and strong action is clearly warranted.”[1]
Climate change will have a devastating impact on food yields around the world. Many areas, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, are likely to be affected in terms of both nutrition and incomes.[2] Severe crop losses are predicted in areas that already struggle with poor food security, such as South Asia and southern Africa. Scientists predict that over just two decades, Southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030 and in South Asia, losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could be as high as 10%.[3]
These are just some of the reasons why climate change will affect the lives and safety of large numbers of people around the world.
The true cost of cheap meat is becoming more and more evident. Today, animal agriculture is one of the top contributors to serious environmental problems including the emission of greenhouse gases and global warming.
A 2017 landmark study found that the top three meat firms – JBS, Cargill and Tyson – emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than all of France, and the top 20 meat and dairy companies emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than all of Germany – Europe’s biggest climate polluter by far. It’s clear that that the world cannot avoid a climate catastrophe without addressing the staggering emissions from the meat and dairy industries.[4]
A central problem is the clear lack of transparency in the animal agriculture industries. In 2019, the FAIRR Protein Producer Index ranked 60 of the largest global meat, dairy and fish producers by looking at sustainability risk factors including greenhouse gas emissions, the use of antibiotics and deforestation. Their report said that in stark contrast to the transport sector, only one in four meat, fish and dairy producers even measure their greenhouse gas emissions, let alone act to reduce them.[5]
These 60 producers are the hidden suppliers to household names such as McDonald’s, Burger King and Marks & Spencer. Together, they make up around one-fifth of the global livestock and aquaculture market – that’s one in every five burgers, steaks or fish.
The FAIRR report says: “We now know processing 70 billion animals for 7 billion humans every year produces more than 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – more than the whole transport sector. We know the livestock industry is the single largest driver of habitat loss worldwide. We also know that 73% of all antibiotics are used in factory farming, in many instances to help animals grow faster, accelerating the development of superbugs.”[5]
References:
[1] Stern N. 2006. Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change Executive Summary
[2] McMichael AJ, Powles JW, Butler CD et al. 2007. Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health. Lancet. 370 (9594) 1253-1263.12
[3] Lobell DB, Burke MB, Tebaldi C et al. 2008. Prioritizing climate change adaptation needs for food security in 2030. Science. 319 (5863) 607-610
[4] GRAIN, IATP and Heinrich Böll Foundation. 2017. Big meat and dairy’s supersized climate footprint.
http://www.grain.org/article/entries/5825-bigmeat-and-dairy-s-supersized-climate-footprint
[5] FAIRR. 2018. Coller Fairr protein producer index. https://www.fairr.org/index/
Source: https://viva.org.uk/planet/the-issues/climate-crisis/
|
"The World Food Programme writes, 'Climate change is a hunger risk multiplier, threatening to undermine hard-won gains in eradicating hunger and poverty. Current projections indicate that unless considerable efforts are made to improve vulnerable people’s resilience, 20 percent more people will be at risk of hunger by 2050 due to the changing climate.' But it’s not just via climate change that animal agriculture contributes to food insecurity. Farming animals is notoriously inefficient and wasteful when compared to growing plants to feed humans directly, with the end result that 'livestock' animals take drastically more food from the global food supply than they provide.
This is because in order to eat farmed animals, we have to grow the crops necessary to feed them, which amounts to vastly more crops than it would take to feed humans directly. (In 2023, we feed and slaughter some 75+ billion land animals every year; there are 8+ billion humans on earth). To give one example, it takes 25 pounds of grain to yield just one pound of beef — while crops such as soy and lentils produce, pound for pound, as much protein as beef, and sometimes more.
Compounding this inefficiency is the fact that only a small fraction of the plant energy consumed by an animal is converted into edible protein. Most of the energy from crops fed to farmed animals is used to fuel their own metabolism, with only a fraction of those grains and other plants being turned into meat."
Source:
https://awellfedworld.org/issues/hunger/why-we-need-plant-based-approaches
"The proportion of water used to produce animal products is not small. In fact, it’s estimated that meat and dairy are responsible for around a third to 40 per cent of agriculture’s water demands. Given that animal products only provide 18 per cent of the world’s calories this is an inefficient use of an extremely limited resource...
One acre of land can yield between 2-20 times more plant food than animal-based foods. Writes Richard Oppenlander, 'We are essentially using twenty times the amount of land and crops, and hundreds of times the water, as well as polluting our waterways and air and destroying rainforests, to produce animals to kill and eat … which is unhealthier than eating the plant products we could have produced.'
In fact, analysis of global agricultural yields finds that better use of existing croplands could feed four billion more people simply by shifting away from growing crops for animal feed and fuel, and instead growing crops for direct human consumption. Reallocating croplands in this way could increase available global food calories by as much as 70 percent, according to researchers."
Source:
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/devastating-water-footprint-animal-agriculture/163485/
"The primary way that industrial animal farms contribute to water pollution is through waste storage. Factory farms house thousands or tens of thousands of animals in a relatively small area. All of these animals produce waste. The waste is high in nutrients, including nitrates, which have now become the most common contaminant in the world’s groundwater aquifers. In recent years, veterinary medicines have also made their way into our drinking water due to their heavy use within animal agriculture...
Billions of animals are raised for food around the world. With so many individuals being born, living, and then being killed in a constant cycle that is kept as short as possible to maximize profits, it comes as no surprise that the impact of animal agriculture on water is considerable. Factory farms’ contributions to water pollution stem from the animals and their waste, the operations of the farms, and the production of food for the animals. The pollution caused by these facilities has far-reaching impacts, contributing to disease outbreaks, driving algal blooms, and negatively impacting economies that depend on clean water...
Animal agriculture has a major impact on surface water by encouraging the formation of algal blooms and dead zones...Agriculture contributes to the presence of heavy metals in water. Though there are many industrial sources of such contamination, fertilizer, pesticides, manure, and irrigation play significant roles. Heavy metal exposure has been linked to a number of health conditions including weakened bones, liver and lung damage, and cancer...
A variety of zoonotic diseases can be spread from animals being raised for food to humans and other animal populations via water. One of the major ways that such diseases are introduced to water is through the fecal matter of an infected animal. Diseases that can be transmitted this way include E. coli and Cryptosporidium.
Conclusion: Water pollution is a serious problem not only because it compromises the integrity of the environment, but also because it causes health problems, and potentially death, for a wide range of animals, while also allowing the spread of zoonotic disease. In order to prevent the further degradation of water systems, we must change the way that we eat, by focusing more on eating, and producing, plant-based foods instead of continuing to farm animals en masse on factory farms."
Source:
https://www.farmforward.com/issues/climate-and-the-environment/animal-agriculture-water-pollution
"Globally, 26 per cent of all the world’s ice-free land surface is given to grazing animals and in total animal agriculture uses 83 per cent of all agricultural land, yet it provides less than 20 per cent of the calories consumed and less than 40 per cent of the protein that is consumed.
In the UK, it is estimated that 85 per cent of the land that is used for agriculture is just for animals, which is almost 50 per cent of the entire landmass of the UK. And in the US, 41 per cent of the entire landmass is for animal farming compared to four per cent which is used to grow plants directly for humans, with half of all agricultural land in the US being used specifically for beef production even though it makes up only three per cent of dietary calories."
Source:
https://www.surgeactivism.org/aveganworld
"All farming requires the use of resources, but ‘livestock’ farming tends to be more resource-intensive than alternatives. Two key farming resources are land and water. In terms of land, ‘livestock’ farming accounts for 70 per cent of all agricultural land worldwide. It also uses a third of all arable land, to provide crops to feed ‘livestock’. Providing this land exacerbates deforestation (Kemmerer, 2015), in turn eroding planetary capacity to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a key greenhouse gas (GHG) responsible for anthropogenic climate change (that is, caused by human activity) (Garnett, 2013). By contrast, a recent research review concluded that plant-based diets could sustain the global human population from half the agricultural land currently in use (Chai et al., 2019). In terms of water, ‘livestock’ farming often depends on irrigation using finite fresh water supplies. Animal-protein production has been calculated to use more than four times as much water as the most intensively-irrigated plant-based protein production (Reynolds et al., 2014). Globally, ‘livestock’ farming is responsible for 29 per cent of agricultural fresh water use (Chai et al., 2019)."
Source:
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/why-are-nonhuman-animals-victims-harm/content-section-2.3
Postscript
(i)Anti-vegans will sometimes claim that vegans, in using soy, are causing extensive environmental damage. In reality, the facts show a very different picture...
"More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception...
When someone mentions soy we often think about foods such as tofu, soy milk, tempeh or edamame beans. This feeds into the argument that meat and dairy substitutes – such as switching from meat to high-protein tofu, or from dairy to soy milk – is in fact worse for the environment. But, only a small percentage of global soy is used for these products. More than three-quarters (77%) of soy is used as feed for livestock.
One-fifth of the world’s soy is used for direct (i.e. not from meat and dairy) human consumption. Most of this is first processed into soybean oil. Typical soy products such as tofu, soy milk, tempeh and edamame beans account for just 7% of global demand. Soy can also be used for industrial purposes. Around 4% is used for biofuels, lubricants and other industrial processes. Biodiesel alone accounts for 2.8%."
Source:
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
(ii)A useful website that shows the on-going damage that humanity is doing to this planet is:
https://www.climate.gov/climatedashboard
