"Dutch" > wrote in message news:yabzh.922658$5R2.460557@pd7urf3no...
>
> "Martin Willett" > wrote in message
> ...
> > Dutch wrote:
> >> "Pete <(.¿.)>" > wrote
> >>> On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:47:48 +0000, Martin Willett
> >>> > wrote:
> >>
> >> [..]
> >>
> >>>> The starving are not starving
> >>>> because people eat meat but because they haven't got any money, they
> >>>> will be just as poor if nobody eats meat.
> >>> Not if we care enough to go veggie. There will be more than enough
> >>> food to share, if we care enough to share. If you don't care now,
> >>> you'll never care. That's not our fault.
> >>
> >> That is just vegan rhetoric.There's more than enough food for the world
> >> now, the problem of hunger is not the result of a lack of food, it's a
> >> result of of economic, political, logistic, and climatic factors,

'Livestock a major threat to environment
...
.... a steep environmental price, according to the FAO report,
Livestock's Long Shadow -Environmental Issues and Options.
"The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must
be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening
beyond its present level," it warns.

When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the
livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-
related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more
harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related
nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential
(GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced
methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced
by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia,
which contributes significantly to acid rain.

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth's entire land surface, mostly
permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land
used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are
cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation,
especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of
former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

Land and water

At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about
20 percent of pastures considered as degraded through overgrazing,
compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands
where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management
contribute to advancing desertification.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the
earth's increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other
things to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral
reefs. The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and
hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used
to spray feed crops. Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles,
reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources.
Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Livestock are estimated to be the main inland source of phosphorous
and nitrogen contamination of the South China Sea, contributing to
biodiversity loss in marine ecosystems.

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all
terrestrial animal biomass. Livestock's presence in vast tracts of land
and its demand for feed crops also contribute to biodiversity loss; 15
out of 24 important ecosystem services are assessed as in decline,
with livestock identified as a culprit.
....'
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/...448/index.html

'(i) Micro-climate: Deforestation of TRF leads to drastic changes
in microclimate (Lal and Cummings, 1979), as outlined in Fig. 6.
In general, deforestation eliminates the buffering effect of
vegetation cover and accentuates the extremes. Fluctuations in
micro-climatic parameters are greatly enhanced (e.g., relative
humidity, maximum and minimum temperatures for soil and air).
Deforestation decreases rainfall effectiveness and increases
aridization of the climate. Forest removal increases the magnitude
and intensity of net radiation reaching the soil surface. Ghuman
and Lal (1987) observed that in south central Nigeria, on average,
10.5 and ll.5 MJ/m2/day of insolation were received on a cleared
site compared to 0.4 and 0.3 MJ/m2/day in the forest during the
dry seasons of 1984 and 1985, respectively. There was no
appreciable difference in solar radiation received under forest
during the rainy (May) and dry (December) seasons (Table 8).
Vegetation removal also increases wind velocity (Table 8).

Deforestation decreases the maximum relative humidity, especially
during mid-day. There is also a corresponding increase in air
temperature and evaporation rate. Perhaps the most drastic effect
of deforestation is on soil temperature. The maximum soil
temperature at I to 5 cm depth can be 5° to 20°C higher on
cleared land on a sunny day compared with land under TRF
cover. Because of high soil evaporation, the soil moisture content
of the surface layer is also lower in cleared than in forested soil
(Fig. 7).
...
There are several major concerns about deforestation of TRF.
These concerns are related to local, regional, and global effects
(Fig. 6). Local effects are the most drastic and are related to
changes in soil properties, vegetation, and micro-climate.
Regional effects are related to hydrological characteristics and
changes in meso-climate. Global effects are due to changes in
global cycles of C and N and water vapor and may be related
to global warming or the greenhouse effect.
...'
http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbook...e/uu27se05.htm

"Our study carried somewhat surprising results, showing that
although the major impact of deforestation on precipitation is
found in and near the deforested regions, it also has a strong
influence on rainfall in the mid and even high latitudes," said
Roni Avissar, lead author of the study, published in the April
2005 issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology.
....'
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/..._rainfall.html

> >> not due to a worldwide food shortage.

'As stocks run out and harvests fail, the world faces its worst crisis
for 30 years

By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 03 September 2006

Food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging
the world into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures
show that this year's harvest will fail to produce enough to feed
everyone on Earth, for the sixth time in the past seven years.
Humanity has so far managed by eating its way through stockpiles
built up in better times - but these have now fallen below the danger
level.
....'
http://news.independent.co.uk/enviro...cle1325467.ece

> >>If everyone truly "cared" the problem could
> >> be solved today.

'Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth's entire land surface,
mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the
global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report
notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major
driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for
example, some 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have
been turned over to grazing.
.....'
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/...448/index.html

From Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment.
1997. Pp. 56-73. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
"How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?"..

'By eating different species of crops and a more or less vegetarian
diet people can change the number that a plot can feed. And large
numbers of people do change their diets. The calories and protein
available from present cropland could provide a vegetarian diet to
ten billion people. A diet requiring food and feed totaling 6,000
calories daily for ten billion people, however, would overwhelm
the capability of present agriculture on present cropland. The
global totals of sun, CO2, fertilizer, and even water could produce
far more food than what ten billion people need.
...'
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?re...d=4767&page=56

> > That is why vegetarianism is such a bad idea. If you want to feed the
> > world just do it. There's nothing stopping you except money and political
> > will. Meat is irrelevant. Don't wait for everybody to change to a
> > lifestyle you show to be so unattractive. What is the point of being a
> > vegetarian when everybody is? Nobody will notice. Nobody will care. You
> > won't be special any more. The animals haven't noticed, they never will.
> > Nobody will thank you.
> >
> > If the whole world does become vegan what will the shock-troops of
> > veganism do with their surplus moral outrage? That doesn't bear thinking
> > about, does it? But don't worry, everybody knows it isn't going to happen.
> > You're as safe being a vegan as you are being an anarchist or a Jehovah's
> > Witness: for all you whinge on about how wonderful it will be you can be
> > confident that it will never actually happen and you can carry on feeling
> > superior to the rest of the population and having your own little hobby.

'Avoiding acceptance of responsibility - denial, counterattack and
feigning victimhood

The serial bully is an adult on the outside but a child on the inside;
he or she is like a child who has never grown up. One suspects that
the bully is emotionally retarded and has a level of emotional
development equivalent to a five-year-old, or less. The bully wants
to enjoy the benefits of living in the adult world, but is unable and
unwilling to accept the responsibilities that go with enjoying the
benefits of the adult world. In short, the bully has never learnt to
accept responsibility for their behaviour.

When called to account for the way they have chosen to behave,
the bully instinctively exhibits this recognisable behavioural response:

a) Denial: the bully denies everything. Variations include Trivialization
...
b) Retaliation: the bully counterattacks. The bully quickly and
seamlessly follows the denial with an aggressive counter-attack of
counter-criticism or counter-allegation, often based on distortion
or fabrication. Lying, deception, duplicity, hypocrisy and blame are
the hallmarks of this stage. The purpose is to avoid answering the
question and thus avoid accepting responsibility for their behaviour.
...'
http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm#Denial

> I could not agree more. Much of the world's population that are barely able
> to scrape out an existence rely largely on hunting for small animals like
> rodents and keeping low-maintenance animals like chickens and goats. If
> these extremist vegan dreamers had their way we would be airlifting organic
> rice and carrots to every remote corner of Africa and Asia. What a bunch of
> nonsense. The whole thing is a poorly constructed house of cards.

'The over-industrialized world cannot grow enough feed for its livestock
and have to import huge quantities of fodder from third world countries,
"Because of the large amounts of grain required to produce beef, the
geographic location of cattle herds can be misleading. Most industrial
countries do not have sufficient agricultural land to support their meat
consumption. Beef production is particularly land-intensive, because
one calorie of meat production requires 3 calories of grain inputs for
pork and 10 calories for beef. Land requirements can be up to 50 times
higher than for protein production from grain. As a result, a great deal
of the feed consumed in industrialized countries is not produced on
the home farm, but purchased from developing countries. For example,
Western Europe imports more than 40%, or 21 million tons per year, of
its feed grains from the Third World.";"Feeding the meat-eating (world)
class takes nearly 40% of the world's grain, grown on [one-third] of
the world's cropland."; "There has been a fundamental shift in world
agriculture this century from food grains to feed grains, and cattle now
compete with people for food. A third of the world's fish catch and
more than a third of the world's total grain output is fed to livestock."61
Huge numbers of third world peoples are starving because the crops
grown in their country are exported to fatten Animals in the
over-industrialized nations, "More people are hungry now than ever
before. Many states where hunger is prevalent are net exporters of food."
Even during times of famine, grains continue to be exported from third
world countries to the over-industrialized world, "In addition, about
two-thirds of the total domestic grain crop goes to feed-lots. The
agribusiness production of grains for foreign exchange-earning exports
to the industrialized region is one among several factors in the
displacement of the rural poor in the Third world onto marginal,
ecologically sensitive land. The magnitude of the food value involved
in this trade is significant: the 500 million people suffering starvation
could find relief from this condition if they had the cash to buy the
grains exported to industrial country feedlots. In that sense, the present
level of meat consumption in the wealthy industrialized countries is
directly related to starvation in the poor countries of the world."
.......'
http://www.geocities.com/carbonomics...2/11sp12b.html