[zdkl]

I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming. The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need treatments and colorants so we can pretend this is 'regular' food.

[snowwrestler]

Antibiotics are not given to livestock to reduce loss. They are given to increase mass.

Farming without prophylactic antibiotics--where antibiotics are only used to treat sick animals, as they are in humans--could meet the demand for food easily.

[mercutio2]

There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true.

But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.

[zdkl]

Maybe my pun about meet/meat confused you but the problem definitely isn't limited to meat production. You should see the quantites of pesticides/fertilisers/treatment agents used in the extensive culture of plants. The question holds, if you don't intend to back current production levels that are only possible through over intensive exploitation to the detriment of the product and it's growing medium, what alternatives are there to meet current demand for food in general?

[livestockboy]

Use of pesticides in plant agriculture is mostly driven by huge demand of meat/dairy industry for feed. GMOs also aren't exactly necessary if you don't have 90 billion mouths to feed every day.

There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff.

Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides.

When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those.

91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I...

It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans.

https://xkcd.com/1338/

edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.

[pmoriarty]

I would not be so pessimistic. Lots of things that many people thought certain would never happen or would take a very long time have happened in relatively short order.

Things like the fall of the Soviet Union, desegregation in the US, man on the moon, etc. Even things that required great international cooperation have happened. Like the eradication of smallpox and polio, the creation of the United Nations, etc.

But the reduction of meat consumption and reliance on factory farming need not be done on a global level to be worthwhile. It can happen one country at a time. Even one person or one animal at a time will be helpful, even if it won't solve everything. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

[hx87]

We could meet food demand with quite a bit less production if we ate lower on the food chain, improved transportation infrastructure and reduced waste. People don't go hungry because farmers don't produce enough food, not today; people go hungry because some people don't get enough allocation of resources and/or transportation infrastructure is crappy.