Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
adviser, Lord Haskins, has claimed that altogether Britain throws away about 20 million tonnes of food every year,
80 per cent of which is from homes, shops, restaurants, schools etc, while the rest is lost between the farm gate and
the shop shelf. United States consumers are even more wasteful: their overall food supply is equivalent to 3600
kcals per person, but surveys show that they only consume 2000 kcal of this.
38
If these figures are to be trusted,
US citizens throw away 45 per cent of their food, which, if it were all fed to pigs at a 5 :1 conversion rate, would
in theory supply pork equivalent to nine per cent of their diet.
Clearly, it would be more efficient to waste less food, than feed it to pigs. But even in poor countries (as in
the UK during World War II) there is still a considerable amount of wastage. In the 1980s Cuba, with a population
of ten million, was feeding about half a million pigs daily with a diet of 37 per cent food waste from schools, res-
taurants, hospitals etc, though not from domestic homes. The waste from these sources was providing roughly two
kilos of pork per person per year for everyone in the country.
39
(d) On top of this there are slaughterhouse wastes. In 1991, rendered meat and bonemeal (MBM) from UK
slaughterhouses provided about 500,000 tonnes of high protein animal feed and constituted about four per cent of
pig rations (as well as being fed to poultry and cows).
Today, if this extremely high nutrient MBM, together with Lord Haskins' 20 million tonnes of food waste were
fed to pigs, it would produce at the very least 1,000,000 tonnes of pork, or about 70 per cent of all the pigmeat
consumed in Britain - drastically cutting the UK aggregate feed conversion ratio for pigs from about 4:1 to not
much more than 1:1. Unfortunately none of this food waste nor the MBM is being fed to pigs or any other animals
in the UK - most of it is being inefficiently incinerated to make cement or provide energy. In 1996, MBM was
banned in the UK as a response to the outbreak of BSE, in 2001 the ban was extended to Europe, and in 2002
using kitchen food waste to make pig swill was banned throughout the EU. How the mismanagement of the UK's
livestock sector led to such a perverse waste of resources is described in detail in Chapter 5.
Thankfully the EU's neurotic approach to waste management has not yet spread to Third World countries where
many peasants still rear their pigs on a diet consisting primarily of scraps, crop residues and whatever comes to
hand. According to figures extrapolated from FAO statistics, in the early 1990s developing world pig-keepers fed
their pigs 1.76 kilos of grain for every kilo of pork they produced, while pigkeepers in the developed countries fed
3.67 kilos. The global figure was 2.69 kilos of grain. The rich countries' figure of 3.67 kilos is high, compared
to the much lower figures given by Peter Brooks for British pigs in the early 1990s; it reflects the large US pork
industry concentrated mainly in corn growing areas, rather than spread out across the country to maximize access
to waste. These figures suggest that well over half the feed given to pigs in the developing world is some kind of
waste or residue; and that if the USA, the EU and other industrialized countries were to put their food recycling in
order they could achieve a better performance.
All Flesh is Grass
Many of the high protein wastes fed to pigs, particularly oilseed cake, can be and often
are fed to cows. They make cows more productive, in the sense that they produce more
milk, or put on weight quicker, but they produce meat about twice as inefficiently as if they
were fed to pigs.
