Would you eat 10% less??

svltech · 10-23-2003, 08:36 AM

Now I love meat and am not a veggie. I ran across this from a friend that is a veggie. I like to kill my own food. Saves the land this is talking about. I don' t even eat at fast food restaurants but maybe ten times a year.

A mere 10% reduction in meat consumption by Americans would free up enough land to grow 12 million tons of grain--enough to save the 20 million people that starve to death on our planet each year.

Zelazny · 10-23-2003, 08:46 AM

Those that starve to death is not the result of lack of food. US farmers could produce much more if they were allowed to.

Briman · 10-23-2003, 08:48 AM

We could produce twice as much food as the world needs and people would still starve to death. It has nothing to do with beef production but everything to do with corrupt governments and lack of infrastructure to transport the food to where its needed.

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Jorgy · 10-23-2003, 09:18 AM

More grain production would just mean more that rotted away in the coffers of the government.

Maybe if we had more grain though we could feed more to the cattle and get even better beef though, mmmmmmmmmm, beef

stork · 10-23-2003, 09:22 AM

Do you really think that 20 million people starve to death each year?

I think that is a bogus number. Can you find a source for that number that is credable?

stork · 10-23-2003, 09:23 AM

I forgot to answer the question.

NO WAY!

svltech · 10-23-2003, 09:42 AM

See in how I got this after breakfast I found some small info.

" To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy.

Food is a commodity. ...
Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market.
Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.
More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed. ...
The problem, of course, is that people who don' t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don' t count in the food equation.

In other words, if you don' t have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.
Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM (" Supermarket to the World" ) to produce food for them.
What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food."

-- Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty, Hunger, and Economic Development

As far as how many people die of starvation each year. 20 million does not surprise me, for billions of people make less than 1 dollar a day and when I was overseas it was no shock. According to CNN news just in Africa alone over 38 million faced starvation in just one country. Now take the numbers from all of the other third world or under countries and the number is astronomical.

I forgot to mention that I agree with all of you on that food goes to waste each year and that cutting meat consumption is not a direct solution to the problem. I was just looking for different points of view to what was on his veggie burger box.

Briman · 10-23-2003, 11:19 AM

He can feel good about eating his veggie burger all he wants and pat himself on the back at the end of the day for making the world a better place, but in reality it means nothing. The information on his hamburger box is full of flaws. There are alot of people who make less than $1 per day and live in regions that cannot agriculturally support them. The UN, the United States, and various religeous and other organizations spend billions upon billons of dollars per year to provide food for those that cannot provide for themselves. There is plenty of food to go around, unfortunately there are roadblocks and obstacles in the way.

One graphic illustration of this is in the movie ' Blackhawk Down' where people rush in to get food supplies from a truck delivered to them and a bunch of thugs from the local warlord come in, machinegun all of the people and take the supplies for themselves. This scene is repeated many times every day in the world. The Soviet Union starved its own people at times- actually creating artificial shortages of foods to certain regions for political gains. The Mao starved an estimated 20 million of his own people to death during the ' Great Cultural Revolution' while he he stuffed his fat face with pork.

txbowjunkie · 10-23-2003, 12:20 PM

It might sound cold but we as a nation spend more time worrying about other countries than our own. We have people starving to death in our own country. How about a 1% reduction and see how it works here first! Then well talk about a 10% one.