VEGNEWS.COM^ VegNews 43
whopping 14 percent of Brazilians identify
as vegetarian—a 75-percent rise since 2012.
And a recent study indicated nearly 60
million Brazilians are actively reducing
their consumption of animal products.
Look a little closer, and these apparent
contradictions make perfect sense. Brazil
seemingly has it all—plentiful natural
resources, rich racial diversity, and a
rapidly growing population—but it is
also, perhaps, the one country with the
most to gain and lose from ending its use
of animals for food.THE STAKESBrazil exports so much meat largely
because of its abundance of land on
which it can confine animals; the country
contains the world’s most vast rainforest,
and 91 percent of its deforested land is used
for cattle ranching alone. But the planetneeds its rainforests to absorb greenhouse
gasses and help stave off climate change.
“The world should keep an eye on Brazil,”
cautioned Paula Cardoso, one of the
country's leading animal-rights lawyers. “If
we don’t deal with animal protection here,
we’re attacking the planet’s lungs.”
As is the case around the world,
environmental activists in Brazil didn’t
always align themselves with the vegan
movement. They advocated moving cattle
out of rainforests but hesitated to call on
consumers to reduce meat consumption.
But increasingly, the world can’t ignore
the connection between diet and the
environment, especially after the United
Nations itself declared that reducing or
reversing current global warming trends
“would only be possible with a substantial
worldwide diet change away from animal
products.” The UN cited increased carbon
emissions, deforestation, burning fossilfuels, and water wastage—just a few of
animal agriculture’s devastating impacts.
International environmental protection
group Greenpeace launched a worldwide
campaign in 2018 stating that a 50-percent
reduction in production and consumption
of animal products is needed to decelerate
the biodiversity loss, global warming, and
rising rates of chronic disease associated
with our current consumption habits.
The connection between eating animals
and poor public health is also increasingly
evident in Brazil. Twenty percent of
Brazilians are obese, eight percent have
diabetes, half are overweight, and more
than 50 million people—nearly a quarter of
Brazil’s population—live below the poverty
line. “When you look at how people eat
and the kind of diseases that people have,”
Cardoso says, “you can easily see how
veganism can help our country.”
Flá As in the United States, powerful
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