...THE WORLD TURNED VEGAN?
- 68 per cent – of the world’s agricultural
land for growing crops to feed livestock.
Harvard Professor of Medicine Walt
Willett reckons we could banish most
world hunger today with about 40 million
tonnes of food – yet 760 million tonnes is
fed to farm animals every year.
With world population set to rise
from 7.5 billion to 10.5 billion by 2050,
pressure on resources would increase.
But, as writer and environmentalist
Paul Allen points out, there is another,
more political issue to be tackled. ‘Right
now, we already produce more than
1.5 times the amount of food needed
to feed everyone on the planet. It just
doesn’t get to everyone in need. In other
words, having enough to eat is as much
about politics and big business as dietary
choices,’ he writes for BBC Good Food.
And there is the fact that the global
meat and dairy industries provide work
for millions of people, often in poor com-
munities around the world.
And the animals? What would happen
to all the animals bred for human con-
sumption? Would cows take over the
world? Would they be slaughtered? Or
taken into sanctuaries? Would they
return to the wild? Some farm breeds,
like broiler chickens, would not survive
in the wild; others, like sheep or pigs,
would do better.
But, in spite of a dramatic growth in
veganism – or at least consumption of
vegan products – in recent years, the shift
to plant-based food won’t happen over-
night, enabling farmers to scale down
breeding as demand falls.
What happens in populous Asia will
have a huge impact. Driven by the need
to tackle climate change, rising obesity
and diabetes, in 2016 the Chinese gov-
ernment released new guidelines aimed
at getting the nation’s 1.3 billion people to
reduce their meat consumption by 50 per
cent by 2030.
So maybe the idea of a vegan world by
2050 is not quite so (plant-based) pie-in-
the-sky, after all... O
WHAT IF...A billboard campaign, created by Califor-
nian artist Karen Firito, offered passers-
by an arresting set of choices.
They could do their bit to save 1,300
gallons (4,921 litres) of water in drought-
blighted California by: not flushing the
toilet for six months; or not showering
for three months; or not eating just one
burger today.
Yes, that’s it. One beef burger!
The online version of the campaign
(gotdrought.info) reveals a pound (450
grams) of potatoes uses about 24 gallons
(90 litres) of water to produce, bread 193
gallons (730 litres) – and beef a whopping
5,214 (19,737 litres). All animal products
rank high – cheese is 896 (3,391 litres).
But suppose we all – and this is very
blue skies – the whole world, moved to a
plant-based diet? What would happen?
In 2016 Marco Springmann led a team
that crunched the figures at the Oxford
Martin Programme on the Future of
Food, and came up with the startling
calculation that if the world suddenly
adopted a vegan diet in the year 2050, inthat single year greenhouse gas emissions
could be reduced by two-thirds.
However, a 2019 correction to research
published in Science by Joseph Poore and
T Temecek comes up with a lower figure.
It indicates that a ‘no animal products
scenario’ delivers a 28-per-cent reduc-
tion in global greenhouse gas emissions
across all sectors of the economy (relative
to 2010 emissions). Still significant, but
not nearly so dramatic.
Researchers have looked at other
global benefits of veganism. A broadly
healthier diet could save five million lives
a year, a vegetarian diet seven million;
but a vegan diet would have the biggest
impact, preventing eight million deaths
from chronic diseases, says Springmann.
A vegan future would also free up
space and resources for growing food.
According to research published by The
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition a
meat-eater’s diet requires 17 times more
land, 14 times more water and 10 times
more energy than a vegetarian’s. This is
mainly because we use a large proportionVanessa Baird dreams on. Or maybe not?
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