SOCIO-ECONOMIC
REASONS TO GO VEGETARIAN

Meat is expensive to produce, both economically and agriculturally. With so many starving people in the world today it is a criminal waste of food to produce it. Meat animals are fed perfectly good plant food which could have been fed directly to starving people. For instance, it takes 17 kilos of corn, beans, grains, etc, to produce one kilo of beef in feedlot cattle. This is like investing $17.00 in a bank term deposit and withdrawing $1.00 at maturity!

Europe imports 70% of its protein for animal feed. This is on top of using large proportions of its own arable land. Much of these imported feedstuffs come from countries suffering from poverty or environmental degradation. 95% of world soybean and one third of world grain production is used for animal feed, utilising massive reserves of land. Meanwhile, a child dies of starvation somewhere in the world every two seconds. As the world human population grows, so too does the need for the dwindling reserves of arable land to grow crops to feed it.

Taking into account the large amounts of feed that highly productive food animals need to eat, it has been calculated that one kilogram of animal protein typically takes 100 times as much water to produce as one kilogram of plant protein. To take the example of beef, the production of one kilogram of beef would need 100 kilograms of forage and 4 kilograms of grain. This means that the production of one kilogram of beef takes between 100,000 and 200,000 litres of water, depending on the growing conditions. 87% of the fresh water consumed worldwide is used for agriculture. Clearly meat production is a very inefficient use of water.