Here’s a conundrum for you: What food is it that the more we produce, the more people starve to death? Give up? The answer’s meat!

Most people find that hard to believe, but it’s true. The reason is that meat is an incredibly wasteful way of producing food and on average, just to produce 1kg of it, 10kgs of vegetable protein is used. That vegetable protein could be fed directly to people instead.

The reason this leads to starvation is because people in the wealthy West use so many of the world’s crops to feed their farm animals. It’s even worse that that too; because the West has so much power it can insist that some less wealthy countries grow food for the West’s animals when they could be growing it for their own people.

So what is the ‘West’ and who are these wealthy people? The West is the part of the world which controls most of the money, most industry and has the best standard of living. It’s made up of the European countries, including Britain, and the USA and Canada, so it is sometimes referred to as ‘North’. Although there are some wealthy countries in the ‘South’ such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand, most countries in the southern half of the world are comparatively poor.

About 5600 billion people share this planet, roughly one third of them in the rich North and two-thirds in the poorer South. In order to live, we all use the planet’s crops and natural products – but we don’t all use the same amounts. For example, a child born in the USA will, throughout its life, use 12 times more wood, copper, iron, water, land and so on.

Some of the reasons for these differences in wealth lie back in history. Hundreds of years ago armies from the North conquered countries in the South and turned them into colonies – in effect, they now owned them. They did it because these countries were rich in all kinds of natural resources, including food.

The European colonists used the countries they invaded to supply the products they needed for their industries. Many people who lived in the colonies had their land taken from them or had to grow crops for their European colonists. During this period, millions of people in Africa were also captured and taken back to Europe and America to work as slaves. This was one reason why the North became so rich and powerful.

Colonialism ended forty or fifty years ago after the colonies won their independence, often by fighting for it. Although countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, India and Malaysia, Ghana and Pakistan are now supposed to be independent, colonisation has left them poor and dependent upon the North. And that’s how it still is in many countries. So, when the North says it wants grain for its cattle, the Southern countries don’t have much choice but to grow it. It’s one of the few ways they can get money to pay for the technology and industrialised goods they need, things they can only buy from the North.

It isn’t just products and money that the North has more of. It also has an unfair share of the world’s food. Take Bangladesh and the USA again: the average food intake for a Bangladeshi is 1930 calories per day, while for an American it is 3650 calories. It has been estimated that the minimum amount of food needed for good health is 2360 calories per day. So you can see, the average person in Bangladesh has too little food while the average American eats too much. And about one-third of the average American diet is meat.

Of course it isn’t just Americans who eat large amounts of meat, it’s all populations in the wealthy North. In Britain, the average amount of meat eaten per person is 71kgs per year. In India, on the other hand, the average is only 2kgs of meat per person. The average American eats 112kgs of meat every year, a lot of which is beef. In the United States, children between the ages of 7 and 13 eat nearly six-and-a-half hamburgers each week; and fast food restaurants alone sell 6.7 billion hamburgers every year.

This enormous appetite for hamburgers has an effect on the whole world. It’s only in this century and particularly since the war that people have started eat meat in such a big way – and now meat-eaters are literally devouring the earth. Believe it or not, there are three times as many farm animals in the world as there are people – 16.8 billion of them. Animals have huge appetites and can munch their way through mountains of food. But most of what goes in one end comes out the other end and is wasted. All animals farmed for meat eat more protein than they produce – even the most efficient. Pigs eat 9kgs of vegetable protein to produce 1kg of meat, while chickens eat about 5kgs for 1kg of meat. The remaining kilograms are mainly lost as manure.

Animals in the USA alone eat enough wheat and soya beans to feed 1900 million people – about one-third of all the people in the world, or the whole population of India and China put together. But there are so many cows that even that’s not enough and to keep these non-stop munching machines going, yet more cattle food is imported from abroad. The USA even buys beef from the poor countries of Central and South America, and all these cattle have to be fed in a similar way.

Perhaps the worst example of waste is in Haiti, officially one of the poorest countries in the world where most people have to survive on 1900 calories per day. Much of the country’s best agricultural land is used to grow a kind of grass called alfalfa and big international companies fly their cattle to Haiti to graze on the alfalfa and put on weight. The animals are then killed and the carcasses are flown back to the USA to provide even more burger meat.

To make way for this American cattle, the ordinary people of Haiti are pushed back on to the mountain slopes, where they must farm on the poorest land. To grow enough food here to survive, they overuse the land until it becomes poor and useless, and eventually just blows away in the wind. It’s a vicious circle which sees the people of Haiti get poorer and poorer.

But it isn’t just American cattle which are consuming all the world’s food. The European Union (EU) is the single largest importer of animal feeds in the world – and 60 per cent of this comes from countries in the South. Try and imagine how much space would be taken up if you lumped together the whole of Britain, France, Italy and New Zealand. That’s the amount of land taken up in the poorer countries of the world to grow food for Europe’s animals. And that’s on top of all the fields already in use in Europe for grazing and growing animal feed crops.

Grazing and feeding the 16.8 billion animals farmed for meat is using up more and more of the world’s agricultural land. What’s even more frightening is that the amount of land for growing food is dwindling rapidly while every year the number of people being born is growing. The two sums just don’t add up.

As a result, the poorest two-thirds of the planet are sliding deeper and deeper into a life of starvation in order to support the wealthiest one-third. In 1995, the World Health Organisation issued a strongly worded report called Bridging the Gaps which described the situation as a global catastrophe. According to this report, hundreds of millions of people in the South spend their whole lives in extreme poverty, and about 11 million children die every year from diseases caused by starvation. The gap between North and South is growing wider and if things don’t change, famine, poverty and disease will spread even more rapidly throughout two-thirds of the world.

The tremendous waste of food and land used for producing meat is at the heart of this problem. According to Sir Crispin Tickell of Oxford University, a UK Government adviser on environmental issues, it is logistically impossible to feed the world’s population of 5.6 billion on a meat-based diet. There just aren’t enough resources. Only 2.5 billion people – less than half the world’s total – could be fed on a diet in which 35 per cent of the calories people consumed came from meat. (The very diet now eaten in the USA).

Just imagine how much land could be saved and how many people could be fed if all vegetable protein wasted on animals was fed directly to people instead. And before you say; ‘But I don’t eat grass!’, I’m not just talking about grass. Nearly 40 per cent of the world’s wheat and corn is fed to animals and huge amounts of land are given over to growing things such as alfalfa, peanuts, turnips and tapioca to be used as animal food. This land could just as easily be used to grow food for people.

If the whole world ate a vegetarian diet – that’s plant foods and dairy products such as milk, cheese and butter – Tickell states there would be enough food right now to feed 6 billion people well. In fact, if everyone became vegan and cut out all dairy products and eggs, the world’s population could be fed on one quarter of the land used at present!

Of course eating meat isn’t the only cause of world hunger but it is one of the most important. So, never let anyone tell you that veggies care only about animals.

‘ My son persuaded myself and my wife, Caroline, to become vegetarians by pointing out that if the world ate the grain instead of feeding it to farm animals, no one would starve.’
Tony Benn, MP

Special Bonus Fact

An area of land the size of 5 football pitches (10 hectares) will grow enough:

Meat to feed 2 people or. . .
Maize to feed 10 people or. . .
Grain to feed 24 people or. . .
Soya to feed 61 people