Global Food Shortage, Hunger and Livestock

Rising food prices have plunged an additional 75 million people below the hunger threshold, bringing the estimated number of undernourished people worldwide to 963 million in 2008. One billion people are expected to face hunger and starvation in the next year!

Global food riots made major headlines during 2008, yet global crop production was the highest ever!

Food riots took place in across the globe, in Egypt, Haiti, Cameroon, Peru, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia, to name a few.

The price of rice rose by 75% in the over 2007 and wheat has increased by 130%, which may not be much to a citizen of a wealthy country, but nearly 1 billion people are expected to face hunger and starvation in the next year.

The Control Is In Our Hands

By Changing what we put on our plates we can help the poorer people by reducing global food prices, increase available grains, help reduce global greenhouse gas emission, reduce surface pollution of the planet, bring an end to the illegal logging of the Amazon, and help save the planet from a somewhat dubious future.

So what happened to all the food?

While the majority of the press blamed the food shortages on biofuel crop production, the real culprit was livestock. If all the cereal grains and soy currently fed to livestock were fed directly to humans, each of the people currently starving would have over 1 ton of food per year.

This 760m tons that is fed to animals could cover the global food shortage 14 times over, and it represents something we actually have control over. Chicken consume 2 kilograms of feed for each 1 kilogram they weigh. Cattle eat 8kg of grain or meal for every 1 kilogram of they gain. An enormous waste when you consider that the rich people of the world are over-consuming meat, while the poor people are starving.

All these changes will be the result of humans eating less meat or switching to a vegetarian diet.

In The Land, a magazine produced by Simon Fairlie, he revised his earlier calculated figures to show that a vegan diet in Britain requires only half the land of a conventional diet, other calculations show that a vegan diet could be grown on as little as 1/5 the land as a typical meat based diet. A shocking revelation in a world that is currently gripped by hunger riots.

Are the global hunger riots the product of global inequalities, as the richer nations crave for a flesh based diet?

Considering that livestock already consume almost half of the world’s grains, and their numbers are rising almost exponentially. The answer seems to be yes.

The Control Is In Our Hands

By Changing what we put on our plates we can help the poorer people by reducing global food prices, increase available grains, help reduce global greenhouse gas emission, reduce surface pollution of the planet, bring an end to the illegal logging of the Amazon, and help save the planet from a somewhat dubious future.

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World Hunger Solution: Grow vegetables to feed humans instead of raising animals