Global Hunger - Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety - page 117

meating demand for food?
according to a united nations environment programme report, the
environmental food crisis , “stabilizing the current meat production per
capita by reducing meat consumption in the industrialized world and
restraining it worldwide to 2000 levels of 37.4/kg/capita in 2050 would
free an estimated 400 million tons of cereal per year for human
consumption” —providing enough cereals to satisfy the annual calorie
need for more than 1 billion people in 2050.
amount of grain needed to
feed 1 person for 1 year on a
grain-based diet: 180 kg
amount of grain needed to
feed 1 person for 1 year on a
meat-based diet: 980 kg
(Not even counting the buffer, that's 32 pounds of grain for every
man woman and child in the country.) Since monsoon rains were
expected any day, we asked what he planned to do with all this
excess.
“We'd like to export it if we can,” he said, and we silently mused
about exporting to which countries, and for what? To factory farms
in China, perhaps, where, like many developing countries, the de-
mand for factory-farmed meat, eggs, and milk has been rapidly
increasing? At this rate, the global increase in factory-farmed pro-
duction will require annual feed consumption of cereals to rise by
292 million metric tons between 1993 and 2020—nearly six times
current U.S. grain exports. We also thought of the striking esti-
mate we'd heard that morning from the head of a children's health
foundation—that half of India's children suffer from inadequate
nutrition.
So we asked what seemed an obvious question: “With so many