From wheeler@super.org Wed Feb 24 17:53:57 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 10:34:35 EDT
From: wheeler@super.org (Ferrell S. Wheeler)
To: tms@cs.umd.edu
Subject: BB/OPED Bello



OP-ED 4 

  Beyond Beef Campaign
  1130 17th St., NW
  Suite 300
  Washington, D.C.  20036
  Tel: 202-775-1132
  Fax: 202-775-0074


Cows Eat Better Than People Do

  By Dr. Walden Bello, Executive Director, Food First/The Institute for
     Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, CA


  Every time you eat a hamburger you are having a relationship with
thousands of people you never met.  Not just people at the supermarket
or fast food restaurant but possibly World Bank officials in Washington,
D.C., and peasants from Central and South America.  And many of these
peopple are hungry.

  The fact is that there is enough food in the world for everyone.  But
tragically, much of the world's food and land resources are tied up in
produciing beef and other livestock -- food for the well-off -- while
millions of children and adults suffer from malnutrition and starvation.

  The mathematics are simple.  For every pound of feed-lot beef on our
plates, an American cow eats nine pounds of grain and soy feed.  In the
1980's, the world grain supply alone was enough to provide every human
on the planet with 3,600 calories a day -- more than enough to meet
everyone's average nutritional requirements.  As Frances Moore Lappe,
author of _Diet for a Small Planet_, explains, "Our food system takes
abundant grain, which hungry people can't afford, and shrinks it into
meat, which better-off people will pay for."  Cattle and other livestock
eat 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States.

  We may think that U.S. grain exports feed the hungry around the world.
But in reality, three-fourths of the corn, barley, sorghum, and oats
imported by poor countries goes to feed animals.

  How can it be true that people are hungry -- even starving -- while an
abundance of food is produced?  The problem is not scarcity of food, but
that cows often eat better than people do.  It all depends on how meat
is produced.  Livestock, such as chickens and pigs, raised on kitchen
scraps and other waste, can supplement a poor family's diet by
converting inedible materials into meat and eggs.  Livestock raised by
small farmers who rotate pasture with food crops can improve soil
fertility while raising livestock for additional home consumption or
market income.  Paradoxically, however, grain-fed meat and meat raised
through extensive farming on land that used to be accessible to peasants
and small farmers to produce subsistence and market crops can create
hunger while it creates food.

  In Central America, staple crop production has been replaced by
extensive cattle ranching, which now occupies two-thirds of the arable
land.  The World Bank encouraged the switch-over by dumping cattle
credit into the region, with an eye toward expanding U.S. fast-food and
frozen-dinner markets.  The resulting expansion of cattle ranching has
deprived peasants of access to the land they depend on for growing food.
And because of ranching's limited ability to create jobs (cattle
ranching creates thirteen times fewer jobs per acre than coffee
production), rural hunger has soared.  Concentrating on Central
America's "comparative advantage" in cattle exports has not created the
kind of economic growth that can end hunger.  Poor people, deprived of
land on which to grow food and without adequate income to buy imported
food, are not the ones who benefit from beef exports.

  In parts of Mexico and South America, beef production is linked to
increasing poverty in a different way -- the switch-over form growing
food crops to feed crops.  In Brazil, half of the basic grains produced
are sold as livestock feed, while the majority of the rural poor suffer
>from malnutrition.  The shift from black beans, a basic food crop, to
soy beans feeds the beef appetites of the Brazilian elites and foreign
importers of Brazillian livestock feed, not Brazil's hungry masses.  A
study by David Barkin of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico
City found that in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, the
Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Venezuela, production of meat
for the rich has crowded out basic food production for the poor.

  What does all this have to do with our hamburgers?  The American
fast-food diet and the meat-eating habits of the wealthy around the
world, support a world food system that diverts food resources from the
hungry.  But we do not have to unknowingly go along for the ride.
Choosing to eat a diet lower on the food chain is a way of rejecting our
position at the top of what environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin calls
the "protein ladder."  A diet higher in whole grains and legumes and
lower in beef and other meat is not just healthier for ouselves, but
also contributes to changing the world system that feeds some people and
leaves others hungry.

  That is why we at Food First are joining the Beyond Beef campaign to
encourage Americans to eat less beef and other meat.


[Stephanie Rosenfeld, a research associate with Food First, contributed
to this article.]




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