Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Feed Buffer
There is a sense in which all of us on planet Earth benefit from the same accelerated
vision as the Maring. When George Monbiot states 'the world produces enough food for its
people and its livestock, though some 800 million are permanently malnourished' we may
struggle to understand the contradictory nature of the statement. Like the Maring with their
pigs, our livestock have brought us to the brink of our global carrying capacity, and it is
a good job that it is they who have brought us there, otherwise it would be us who would
have to pay the price. It is time for us to slaughter some of our pigs and plant our rumbim
trees.
In other words, it is a fundamentally reassuring fact that if the world does start to run out
of food, this is a relative rather than an absolute state of affairs. As campaigners frequently
point out, we can solve the problem by eating less meat:
If the earth can sustain two billion omnivores, it might in theory support 20 billion
vegans.
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Reducing meat production by just ten per cent in the US would free enough grain
to feed 60 million people.
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The above statements are taken from articles where they have been used as an argument
for veganism. But to my mind they are an argument for eating meat, or at the very least for
having eaten it. If we had overstretched the limits of our carrying capacity by eating noth-
ing but super-efficient grains, there would be 20 billion vegans in the world, acre upon acre
of soybean or wheat or rice monoculture largely dependent upon fossil fuel fertilizers and
no easy way out.
Fortunately we haven't, and there is a solution, which is not dissimilar from the Maring's
kaiko
. It is highly likely that people in the United States, Europe, Japan and other excess-
ively carnivorous countries will have to cut down their consumption of meat to accommod-
ate further population increases, and to effect a more equitable distribution of resources.
That doesn't, obviously, mean slaughtering untold numbers of cows and pigs in one fell
swoop, and dishing them out to the Third World for Christmas. It means reducing the size
of the overdeveloped world's herd so that we can be fed more efficiently off a higher per-
centage of inedible waste products and release a bit of ecological space. Fortunately a little
bit of meat restraint releases a lot of nutrients (especially if the meat comes from feedlots
which do attain something close to the legendary ten to one ratio of inefficiency).
It is a fundamentally reassuring fact that if population growth outstrips increases in crop
yield, and food reserves run short, we can remedy the situation by getting rid of some of
