· New Delhi ·
We have hysteria about Climate Change and at the same time get hyper about Meat-Eating Rights !
Bhai can't you see the connect ? Are you blind ?
Managed consumption is the ONLY ROUTE to SUSTAINABILTY .
And I don't care how the sustainability cat is caught , rationing or religion .
Something will be done . By state-fiat or religious-law . That I have no doubt of . Just as our energy consumption will be managed soon .
And the fact that there are more vegetarians in India than the rest of the world together , should be an Ecological Celebration worthy of the Right Livelihood Prize , not derision by its elites and the media around the world . It is downright pathetic and intellectually dishonest .
That is why I stopped hanging around politically-correct people years ago. They are hypocritical and irrelevant . Give me a soldier and a trader any day .
The fact is that large urban populations with rising incomes world over eat more meat . And among meats Beef takes the Beef per kg of any meat of all natural resources like land, water , feed , energy.
Beef requires 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases.
Brazil is now the world’s largest beef exporter. Clearing rainforest for this multi-billion dollar industry is now responsible for 80 percent of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon (or about 14% of the world’s total annual deforestation, making it world's largest single driver of deforestation.)
Imagine if billions more start eating Beef . All the World's forests will be cut to make your Hamburger .
Maybe that is what we want , be the Beef Patty between our obsession of the Cloud and the Car .
So if you want high animal proteins have crickets , almost 80% of it can be eaten (only 40% of cattle can !) ! Insects is the way out for your meat addiction .
In 2011, an estimated 58 TRILLION chickens were slaughtered around the world - that's compared to roughly 1.4 trillion pigs and 300 million cattle.
German public policy group Heinrich Boell Foundation and Friends of the Earth have an annual publication Meat Atlas, which illustrates food trends around the world.
"In the rich North we already have high meat consumption. Now the poor South is catching up," Barbara Unmuessig, the foundation's president, told BBC. "Catering for this growing demand means industrialized farming methods: Animals are pumped full of growth hormones. This has terrible consequences on how animals are treated and on the health of consumers."
Poultry is the fastest growing segment of globalized livestock. By 2020, China's poultry production will increase 37%, Brazil's will increase 28%, and U.S. production will increase 16% due to growing consumption around the globe. In India, poultry consumption is expected to rise nearly tenfold to just below 10 million tons a year in 2050.
Only a small percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe describe themselves as vegetarians or vegans. It's much more popular in India since Buddhism and Hinduism share beliefs about rebirth and the importance nonviolence that leads people to reject the consumption of meat due to the slaughter of animals.
Mark Johnston I'm
afraid the item is out of date in one key respect. Sadly India has now
become the world's largest exporter of beef. The impact of this
industrial scale 'farming' barely relates to the lives of the villagers
you live amongst but it does make a lot of
money for the bankers and politicians. The environment sees little
difference between us exploiting the land to overproduce domestic cattle
and domestic buffalo. This is a world wide issue, Scotland may not
produce as much meat but it is only about 0.5% of the population and
land area of India and does far more environmental harm per head of
population.
Mark Johnston I'm
afraid so. In general people feeding meat to a large pet dog have a
bigger negative environmental impact than the large four wheel drive car
they drive around in. That is not to say that the impact of subsistence
farmers or gatherer hunter societies is not tiny compared to that of a
wealthy, high consumption, vegetarian or vegan.
Aparna Krishnan i see. thanks. had not understood this perspective.
Mark Johnston Perhaps, in terms of the growing factory farming, it should be defined as an industrial
Swarna Latha but is India's meat industry also guilty of 'factory farming'?
Swarna Latha A
couple of decades ago, a no-nonsense kind of person asked me, a
'strict' vegetarian, to think about eskimos, and other communities who
can't but depend on meat. For me, hailing from conservative Chennai that
was an eye-opener. Now i know that sourcing local, and sourcing only as
per need is sustainable.
Swarna Latha On
the vegan issue too, the processed cheese industry and India's mithai
businesses are the reasons for over-demand for milk, and hence the
obsessive-compulsive adulteration of milk. (pl correct me if i'm wrong)
Is anyone ready to ban processed cheese, and regulate the mithaiwallahs?
Is anyone ready to ban processed cheese, and regulate the mithaiwallahs?
Mark Johnston It
is hard to be convinced that an annual export of 2.4 million tons of
beef and veal is predominatly coming from small scale sustainable family
farms. However although I have collected cattle manure by hand for
growing vegetables from an Udaipur dairy I have no personal experience
of the beef export industry.
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