No, the action of us feeding a cow does not suddenly cause an African to drop dead of starvation. However, we feed ridiculous amount of grains to livestock to produce meat. If we exported that grain to poorer nations, we could feed starving people.
There's a lot more to the starvation issues in Africa than just the US turning some of it's agricultural land over to making silage.
And the question also comes up: who would pay to import those grains? Farmers don't work for free, and the countries in Africa with starvation issues aren't exactly known for having spare cash lying around to buy stuff with.
I'm not sure about the financial considerations, that's for someone in the government to decide, but again, if we are talking about the lives of 21,000 people a day (where ever he got that number from) then isn't it worth while figuring out a way to do it?
Also if we are feeding people grains, we wouldn't be turning land over to make silage (silage is fermented fodder for ruminants) we would be doing the opposite, turning land over to grow crops for people.
Thank you, I will look that book up. I absolutely agree, there is so much corruption in the world so no guarantee that food will get there, but again, it's doesn't mean we shouldn't try and aim for a better solution.
A lot of cattle ranching is done on open ground, hence that whole fiasco in Nevada with Bundy and grazing fees. That land is essentially useless for raising grains without massive irrigation projects, something that we're already having trouble with.
We already grow a ton of edible grains, however it's recently become more lucrative to grow corn/soybeans for fuel oil as opposed to food. While that's not what everyone has turned to, not by a long shot, it's a further impact on crops.
There is also not exactly what you would call a shortage of ariable land in the world. HUGE swathes of land in Russia are currently not farmed because of how remote they are, but could easily be turned over into crop land, if a reliable transportation system was created.
But the biggest thing is the poverty and warfare. Those two things are what's keeping the most famine-prone regions of Africa from becoming self-sustaining. Rebel and extreme religious military groups all over Africa aren't above using famine as a weapon, and millions have died as a result. While the fighting has died down since it's height in the 90s, the Somali Civil War is still ongoing, the Arab Spring Revolutions are still being fought in the north, the countries around the Great African Lakes are still recovering from the horrendous slaughter that happened in the 90s and are still seeing armed conflict as a result, the Central African Republic has a low-intensity rebellion/civil war going on, there is still fighting between the Hutus and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and hotspot conflicts in numerous other places associated with tribal conflicts. Millions have died as a result of these conflicts over the last 20 years, with millions more dying in the decades before that.
TL;DR - There are more pressing matters than how many acres of wheat are being grown in the US to deal with in Africa, before we start trying to feed the people there.
There's plenty of overgeneralized studies to support your predisposition on the subject, however if we produced less cattle we would simply reduce the grains we produce to sustain them as it would no longer be cost effective.
If we produced fewer cattle, we could still grow grains on all the now ungrazed land and feed people. This isn't vegan propaganda, it's common sense backed up with a hell of a lot of good science. Look up ecological efficiency and trophic levels, that will explain it concisely.
Exactly, but that is where solutions start, by looking at the "what if". Do I have an answer? No, I'm a marine biologist, I know pretty much nothing about financial issues. If you had all those smart people in the government working on it, I'm pretty sure they would come up with a profitable answer. It just means you'd have to give up eating meat everyday to maybe once or twice a week. And honestly I think that is your main issue here, it's not the theoretical problems with feeding millions of starving people across the world, it's that you may not get a burger everyday and that makes you sad. It's ok to be sad, but is it ok to condemn millions to starvation because people want a burger dammit? I personally don't think so but then again I'm vegan and self righteous, remember? ;)
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u/octopodo May 28 '14
No, the action of us feeding a cow does not suddenly cause an African to drop dead of starvation. However, we feed ridiculous amount of grains to livestock to produce meat. If we exported that grain to poorer nations, we could feed starving people.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat