Do you think that the factory-farming of animals mentioned in
my post on Friday helps to feed the additional 3.2 billion people on the planet since the first Earth Day?
Tragically not.
Consider the environment and the food crisis: there is no ethical difference between eating meat and throwing vast quantities of food in the trash, since the animals we eat can only turn a small fraction of the food that is fed to them into meat calories—it takes six to twenty-six calories fed to an animal to produce just one calorie of animal flesh. The vast majority of what we grow in the United States is fed to animals—that is land and food that we could use to feed humans or preserve wilderness—and the same thing is happening all over the world, with devastating consequences. [Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, pp. 210-211]
Note that the animals in question were bred, artificially inseminated, heavily injected with antibiotics (dangerous for public health), and speedily fattened only to be slaughtered for people to eat; it's not as though we'd start feeding people plants at the animals' expense.
The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? [emphasis mine, Foer, p. 211]
It's unfortunate that such arguments are used to excuse an ever-growing human population; such use ignores the destructive effects of humans on the environment as their standard of living approaches that of the United States and Western Europe.
If everyone consumed like an American
The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest—extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding. [from the January 28 New York Times Book Review, "Thy Neighbor’s Wealth," Catherine Rampell's review of The Haves and the Have-Not: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, by Branko Milanovic]
[April 29. Because that comparison between the rich of India and the poor of American was challenged as "preposterous" by a respected follower, I've consulted Milanovic's book. Rampell was summarizing "Vignette 2.2: How Unequal Is Today's World?," from Chapter 2. P. 116 presents a comparative graph of income data:
Milanovic explains the graph:
We take the entire population of the United States and divide it into twenty income groups ranked by their household per capita income from the poorest to the the richest. Each group is called a ventile...Each contains 5 percent of the American population. We do the same "slicing" of all countries in the world. Each ventile will therefore "enter" with its own average income expressed in local currency. This income is converted into international (PPP) dollars of equal purchasing power so that in principle, with such a dollar, a person can buy the same amount of goods and services in India as in the United States or anywhere else in the world. This enables us to compare incomes worldwide.
...The poorest American ventile, as shown in the figure, is at the 68th percentile of the world income distribution...This means that the poorest Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population....
India, by contrast, is fairly poor, with its poorest ventile belonging to the 4th-poorest percentile in the world and the richest ventile only to the 68th. This last value shows that the richest people in India(as a group—admittedly a large one since it contains more than 50 million people) have the same per capita income as the poorest people (as a group) in the United States. [emphasis mine]...For sure, if we were to break national distributions into smaller units, not in ventiles of 5 percent each, but in percentiles (1 percent each), we would find some overlap. But the overlap is still tiny. In the case of India and the United States, only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile. [pp. 116-118]
Rampell should perhaps have avoided the phrase "typical person"; Milanovic doesn't use it. His writing on this complex topic seems wonderfully careful and clear.]
If everyone consumed like an American, continued
Emerging economies like those of China and India aspire to the living standards of the Western world as does the non-industrialized world in general. It is the combination of population increase in the developing world and unsustainable consumption levels in the developed world that poses a stark challenge to sustainability. [Wikipedia article on sustainability, section titled "Consumption—population, technology, resources"]
China and India's combined population today is more than eight times that of the United States (2,554 million versus 311 million).
Today, animal products still account for only 16 percent of the Chinese diet, but farmed animals account for more than 50 percent of China's water consumption—and at a time when Chinese water shortages are already cause for global concern. [Foer, p. 262]
The point is: the Chinese have
only begun to eat animals. And...
Studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport. According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector—cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships—combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO2. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do. [Foer, p. 58]
Five planet Earths
In the starkest general terms:
Consumption overpopulation, also known as overconsumption, is the name for the concept of unsustainability and imbalance in per capita energy consumption between different countries...The classic example of consumption overpopulation is the United States, which consumes more resources than practically any other country in the world. It emits 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide every 5.4 seconds, by far the highest in the world. For perspective, China [with over four times the population of the United States] emits the same amount of carbon dioxide every 9.2 seconds, Britain every 58 seconds, Canada every minute, Nigeria every 10.1 minutes and the Central African Republic every 31.6 hours. If every single person in the world consumed as much energy as an American, we would need five planets to be able to support all of them. India and China alone would take up one of these. [emphasis mine, Wikispaces article on consumption overpopulation]
Before someone points it out for me, I detect a problem with the final statement. China and India combined account for 37 percent of the world's current population. Wouldn't they take up 1.85 of the five planets? The author appears to have rounded the number down.
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