Worldwide, approximately 1 billion people are undernourished. Around 30 million people per year – or approximately one person every single second – starve to death.
Every day, up to 43,000 children die of starvation while at the same time the meat and dairy industries use approximately 50 per cent of the world’s corn and roughly 90 per cent of its soybeans to feed farmed animals! It is absurd, scandalous and an inexcusable waste of resources to feed plant foods to animals in order to produce unhealthy meat, eggs and dairy products for wealthy nations. Depending on the animal, it can take up to 16 kilograms of plant foods and 10 to 20 tonnes (10,000 to 20,000 litres!) of water to produce just one kilogram of meat. Although people in Third World countries often go hungry and even starve to death, many of these countries export crops to industrialised nations for use as “livestock” feed. You may be familiar with the famous adage “Rich people’s animals eat the poor man’s bread”. Unfortunately, it’s true. For example, the famine that broke out in Ethiopia in 1984 occurred because crops were exported to Europe to be fed to farmed animals, not because local farmers could not produce more food. Tens of thousands of people died during the famine as European countries continued to import corn from Ethiopia in order to feed chickens, pigs and cows. If that corn had been used to feed Ethiopia’s people, there would have been no famine. In Guatemala, approximately 75 per cent of children under 5 are undernourished. At the same time, the country produces more than 17,000 tonnes of meat for export to the US. Huge amounts of corn and soybeans are used to feed the animals who are slaughtered to produce this meat – crops that as a result cannot be used to feed undernourished children. So instead of feeding hungry people around the world, we use our resources to fatten suffering farmed animals so that we can satisfy our addiction to the meat, eggs and dairy products that are making us sick.
