Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
O
N
G
RANARIES
Menenius: For the dearth, the Gods, not the Patricians make it … and you slander the helms o' th' state; who care for
you like fathers.
First Citizen: Care for us? True indeed, they ne'er car'd for us yet. Suffer us to famish and their storehouses cramm'd
with grain.Coriolanus Act I Scene 1, William Shakespeare
V
egan propagandists sometimes argue that meat causes famine, or at least is implicated
in it:
The livestock industries of the world scour the globe in search of cheap sources of protein … At the height of
the 1984 famine which inspired the historic Band Aid concert, Ethiopia exported feed crops to the UK. Similarly,
in 1997, during times of extreme food shortages, North Korea exported 1,000 tonnes of maize to Japan for poultry
feed.
1
And according to another vegan writer, quoting from a Scandinavian report on the meat
industry:
During the years of famine in the early 80s, most Sahel countries reported an in-
creased export of agricultural products. This human famine was not a natural disaster
but clearly of political and economic origin. In other words, the starving countries of
sub-Saharan Africa were exporting feed for the west's animals while its own people
were dying. It is difficult to imagine anything more obscene. This scenario is being re-
peated in all the poorest regions of the world, but the devastation is usually presented
as an act of God, of war, or of incompetence. The fingerprints of the true culprits are
never identified.
The true culprits are identified, a few lines further on, as 'multinationals, who are de-
vouring the world's vegetation like a plague of locusts so they can profit from livestock pro-
duction.'
2
The export of food under famine conditions is indeed an obscenity, but the accent on live-
stock is misplaced. It is largely because of demand for animal feed that any surplus food is
