I'm disgusted with that fact that governments are still subsidizing animal products. Move the subsidies to plant-based options and make it easier to take the easy way out. We're literally and figuratively paying as a society for the privilege to raise and slaughter animals when it's 99% unnecessary.
Not sure why this is being downvoted - meat industry is generally subsidised and protected to allow consumers to enjoy cheap meat.
However, most western people are eating way too much meat even from the health perspective - and paying for this is shorter lives and medical bills. There is no perspective on this where eating this much meat is a good thing.
It's actually relatively easy - most countries don't have the land to produce enough plant-based calories, and have plenty of meat-based calorie production.
Why would a government bankrupt an existing and well known and visible sector, to be replaced by imports? Lots of people would be pissed.
> most countries don't have the land to produce enough plant-based calories, and have plenty of meat-based calorie production.
Citation needed. How can a country have enough land for plants to feed pigs and cows that humans will later eat, but not enough land for plants to feed the humans?
As explained elsewhere, lots of the land cows and pigs and sheep and etc. inhabit and graze on is unsuitable for regular crops due to the terrain, fertility, or simply crop rotation.
You are trying to tell me that growing food for animals to eat, and then eating the animals, somehow takes less arable land than directly growing foods for humans to eat?
And yet it's true. 2/3rds of pasture is not suitable for agriculture and would be worthless without ruminants. The corn-fed cattle industry in the US is a result of energy being cheap and labor being expensive. Less than 20% of beef is farmed that way.
That land is called marginal land, or pasture. You can't grow crops there economically r do anything else really. Removing the grazing animals from the land changes nothing and does not improve the environment at all. That land would be worthless if not for grazing animals.
I'm not sure there is enough arible land to support the human population without grazing animals. I suspect anything is possible with enough technology and money, but
matthewmorgan is correct in being concerned.
Many cattle pastures are cleared forests. In the east bay hills of northern California, there are significantly fewer trees where cows graze because they eat any small shoots, preventing new trees from growing. Forest is not worthless, it supports biodiversity and captures carbon.
> Removing grazing animals from the land can allow for reforestation and increase biodiversity and carbon sequestration
Ok. How much land could be reforested that way? Most grazing happens in places that are naturally pasture and were never forest like Texas and Argentina. Northern cali isn't exactly known for beef.
2/3rds of land used for grazing being unsuitable for farming sounds like a lot to me.
EDIT: drooly, HOW MUCH land would become forested if cattle were removed? Because if it's like 1 acre then its not really a good argument for banning all meat. Also I explicitly said I DO think we could survive on an all vegetarian diet I just don't see any reason to do it.
Again, if you read the article you'd be able to answer these questions.
Here's the math:
- 2.89 billion hectares of land is used for pasture, one third of which (870 million hectares) is suitable for growing crops.
- 538 million hectares is used for growing crops to be eaten by animals.
So, by removing meat from our diet we could free up 1.4 billion hectares of land JUST for crop land for human consumption, while allowing the other 2 billion hectares of non arable pasture to reforest - which would have significant impact on carbon sequestration and biodiversity.
Keep in mind that 1 billion hectares of land is the size of North America plus Brazil.
It is estimated that the entire human population would only need 1 billion hectares of land to survive (on an all plant-based diet). This means that ultimately 3 billion hectares of land could be reforested. The reduction in the farming and food shipping industry's carbon emissions would also have significant impact on reversing climate change.
We also grow a ton of crops to use as animal feed. If we only raised meat with natural grazing we'd produce a lot less, it would cost more and we'd heavily mitigate the climate cost. And switch all that feed production to growing human edible plants.