Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
our more inefficient animals. However, if we have to resort to that remedy, it should in no
way be taken as a reason for abandoning animal husbandry altogether. That would be the
height of stupidity for the Maring, and it would be the height of stupidity for the world as a
whole. It would mean that in future there would be no buffer left between a growing human
population and famine.
Even if things never reached that point, a vegan agricultural economy would have no
obvious incentive to 'bank' resources for a poor year. The Maring, we noticed earlier, are
lucky enough not to suffer from large variations in crop yield from year to year; but this
is not the case for many Melanesian tribes, nor for most agricultural economies around the
world; and it is not the case for the world as a whole. As climate change increases, crop
yields are likely to become more erratic and unpredictable.
The overriding advantage of meat is that demand for it is elastic. People don't need it
but they like it, and up to a point, however much you produce, they'll keep on buying it.
The demand for cereals for human consumption, on the other hand, tends to be inelastic.
People need their pound of grain a day, but they don't need much more, and they won't buy
any more unless they have sufficient wealth to invest the grain in animals, either to produce
higher value food, or else to keep it 'on the hoof', for a rainy day (or a drought).
The existence of meat means that a farmer can sow wheat, barley, oats, beans, maize,
and so on with reasonable confidence that, in the event of a good harvest, someone will
buy it, because even if everybody has sufficient, it can be fed to animals. This dynamic is
not restricted to a money economy. It works exactly the same for Melanesian subsistence
farmers who can sow enough sweet potato and manioc to cover a bad year knowing that it
is not a waste of effort, because in a good year the surplus can be fed to pigs.
Take the animals, the elastic element, out of the equation and the business of sowing
grain suddenly becomes far more risky. In a vegan world, if a farmer sowed wheat or rice
and there was a bumper crop resulting in a surplus, where would it be sold? And if there
was a poor crop, where would the reserves come from, and why would they have been
kept? In order to ensure that the world's farmers sow enough seed to cover a bad year, they
must have a market which is elastic enough to buy in a good year.
This elementary matter of the need for a feed buffer fails to feature in most of the liter-
ature that is written about meat-eating and vegetarianism, including full length books; the
only people who seem to take it into account are the FAO and some free market econom-
ists. The FAO observe:
A remarkable characteristic, important for global food security, is the capacity of
the livestock sector to draw on many different types of feed resources and to contract
and expand with resources availability and market demand. During the two recent
global food crises in 1974/75 and 1982/83, reductions in total cereal supply were al-
