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3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

Sources: “Livestock’s Long Shadow” (United Nations), the World Bank, and calculations of Noam Mohr, a physicist at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

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PROMISE 7:

You Will Be Helping Provide Food to the Global Poor

Did you know?

Approximately 1 billion people—1/6 of the population—on this planet don’t have enough to eat.

40 percent of the world’s grain goes to feeding livestock.

In the year 2007 alone, approximately 100 million metric tons of grain and corn was turned into biofuels, which in turn drove up food prices for the global poor by 75 percent, according to a World Bank report; in that same period, 756 million metric tons was fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals.

If 1 in 10 people around the globe stopped eating animals, it would free up enough food to feed the 1 billion hungry.

Try and wrap your head around this: Right now, approximately a billion people on this planet don’t have enough to eat. That is nearly a sixth of the world’s population. That’s right. One out of every six of our fellow humans has to scrounge for food and feel the ache of an empty stomach every day. And each and every year, tens of millions (15 million of them children) die from starvation-related problems like infections and diarrhea—all this even as Americans get more and more obese.

In fact, in a report by Worldwatch Institute called Underfed and Overfed their scientists note that 1.2 billion people in the world are underfed and malnourished, while approximately the same number, a different group of 1.2 billion people, are overfed and malnourished. And both the hungry and the overweight have high levels of sickness, shortened life expectancies, and lower levels of productivity, albeit for entirely opposite reasons—the overfed tend to die of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes while the underfed tend to die of infectious diseases and waterborne illnesses.

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As Americans get more and more obese, tens of millions 15 million of them children) around the world die from malnutrition, infection, and diarrhea.

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In another report by Worldwatch called State of the World, it was noted that 56 percent of the children in Bangladesh are underfed and underweight to the point of illness; in the same report they also found that 55 percent of adults in the U.S. are so overfed and overweight that their health is diminished. The imbalance in food distribution and availability is causing serious problems on both sides of the spectrum. How did this happen?

When I was growing up, my mother used to chide me to finish the dinner on my plate, saying that there were starving people in Africa, and that it was shameful to leave food uneaten. I didn’t quite understand how forcing myself to swallow the last bits of grizzled chicken or beef was being respectful to poor and hungry children in developing countries, but I did what I was told. Instead of feeling like I did the right thing, though, I had a gnawing sense that something was askew. Years later when I read Frances Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet, I realized that in my earnest desire to do the right thing by the global poor, I was in fact supporting the very hunger I felt so badly about. Here’s why…

When you eat meat, it’s like you are taking food right out of the mouths of the poor. The grain that could have fed hungry people instead is shipped to factory farms to feed the 10 billion animals (in the U.S. alone) who are being fattened up for profitable slaughter.

In order for cows, chickens, and pigs to grow big and fat (and fetch a higher price on the market) they of course have to eat. And eat a lot. They are fed feed that is predominantly composed of corn and soy (grown in the U.S. as well as in developing countries) to make them as big as possible, as quickly as possible. Much of the grain they eat goes just to keeping them