FOOTLOOSE FOOD - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 159

and bones, after a favourable monsoon, may fatten up and give birth once again. Harris
considers that the underlying rationale for the slaughter ban is to preserve a sufficient pool
of cows to meet the continual requirement for 80 million beasts of burden. His view is that:
The inevitable effect of substituting costly machines for cheap animals is to reduce
the number of people who can earn their living from agriculture and to force a cor-
responding increase in the size of the average farm … Less than five per cent of US
families live on farms, as compared with 60 per cent 100 years ago. If agribusiness
were to develop along similar lines in India, jobs and housing would soon have to be
found for a quarter of a billion displaced peasants.
And that is indeed what has happened. Urban populations have swelled to previously
unimaginable proportions as a result of India's failure to control its population, which has
doubled since Harris was writing in 1973, and its green revolution, which benefits commer-
cial farmers able to afford fertilizers and tractors at the expense of small farmers. Mean-
while the foreign exchange pouring into the computer and call centre industries has led
to the rise of an Americanized middle class whose allegiance to cow worship, even from
those who remain nominally Hindu, is slim. 'Junk food is fashionable. Eating meat is re-
garded as progressive. Modernization is equated with changing from being vegetarian to
non-vegetarian, even while the rest of the world attempts to reverse this trend.' 41 Abattoirs
meeting modern standards of hygiene are constructed on the edge of the new conurbations.
Notwithstanding a tide of opposition against cow slaughter from the BJP, the party that rep-
resents the Hindu equivalent of Daily Mail readers, the days of the sacred cow appear to be
numbered.
In order to meet the demand for dairy products from an extra 600 million consumers,
Indian agronomists have introduced blood from higher yielding western cows - with con-
siderable success. In 2000, the Indian dairy industry surpassed that of the United States to
become the largest in the world, and in 2006 produced 92 million tonnes - over one and
half litres a week for everyone in the country. Even more encouraging, according to an FAO
document called Dairy Giant Walking Barefoot , the White Revolution was achieved with
'dairy animals largely fed on crop residues', although 'high producing animals are supple-
mented with mostly home mixed concentrate feeds.' 42 Nor has the dispersed structure of
the farming sector been completely undermined. 'The dairy sector in India is predominately
smallholder and unorganized in nature' state the FAO, adding that the 'unorganized sector'
- I like this expression - 'in India accounts for more than 50 per cent of total production
and handles more than 77 per cent of the milk marketed. The total number of households
in production is more than 67 million; out of this 11 million can be characterized as farm-
ers, with an average of two to three animals.' A further 17 per cent of milk is delivered to
110,000 farmers' co-operatives which are sufficiently 'organized' to supply the milk to cit-