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Keep eating beef and you'll kill yourself while killing the planet. I quit 13 years ago, and here's why:
Most people know that beef consumption plays a major role in the development of heart disease, strokes, and cancer. But the over-consumption of beef is also a major cause of human hunger and poverty, deforestation. spreading deserts, water pollution, water scarcity, global warming, species extinction, and animal suffering.
We in the United States are a big part or the problem. Americans consume almost a quarter of all the beef produced in the world. Every 24 hours 100,000 cattle are slaughtered in the United States; the average American consumes the meat of seven 1,100- pound animals in his or her lifetime.
HEALTH
Each year, the death toll continues to mount for consumers of beef and other red meats. According to a report by the U.S. Surgeon General, more than 70 percent of deaths in this country -- more than 1.5 million annually -- are related to diet, particularly the over- consumption of beef and other foods high in cholesterol and saturated fat. Study after study confirms that consumption of red meat is a primary factor in the development of heart disease, strokes, and colon and breast cancer. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all recommend that people reduce their consumption of red meat and other animal-derived foods, and eat more grain, fresh vegetables, and fruits instead.
Recently, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that beef contains the highest concentration of herbicides of any food sold in America. The NAS also found that beef ranks second only to tomatoes as the food posing the greatest cancer risk due to pesticide contamination, and ranks third of all foods in insecticide contamination. Aside from smoking, there is probably no greater personal health risk than eating too much beef and other meat.
GLOBAL HUNGER
The beef addiction of the United States and other industrialized nations has set off a global food crisis. Today, hundreds of millions of cattle are being fed precious grain so that American and European consumers can enjoy the pleasures of "marbled" beef. Meanwhile, nearly one billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and between 40 and 60 million people -- mostly children -- die each year from starvation and related diseases
Currently, more than 70 percent of the U.S. grain harvest -- and more than one third of the grain produced in the world is fed to cattle and other livestock. We could provide proper nourishment to more than a billion people if we used the world's agricultural lands to grow food for human consumption rather than feed for cattle and other livestock.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Forests, particularly the rain forests of Central American and the Amazon, are being burned and cleared to make way for cattle pasture. Since 1960, more than 25 percent of the Central American forests have been lost to beef production -- most of it for export to the United States and Europe. It has been estimated that for every quarter-pound fast-food hamburger made from Central American beef, 55 square feet of tropical forest -- including 165 pounds of unique species of plants and animals -- is destroyed.
Today, the world's 1.3 billion cattle are stripping vegetation and compacting and eroding soil, thus creating deserts out of grasslands. More than 60 percent of the world's rangelands have been damaged by overgrazing during the past half century. In the United States, cattle have done more to alter the environment of the West than all the highways, dams, strip mines, and power plants put together.
Cattle production is a major cause of water pollution. In the United States, cattle produce nearly one billion tons of organic waste each year. It has been estimated that cattle and other livestock account for a significant percentage of pollutants in the nation's rivers, lakes, streams and aquifers. Raising cattle also requires vast amounts of water. Nearly half the water consumed in the United States is used to grow feed for cattle and other livestock -- while our precious stores of fresh water dwindle at an alarming rate.
The grain-fed cattle complex is now a significant factor in the generation of three major gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide -- that are responsible for global warming. The burning of the world's forests for cattle pasture has released billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. The world's 1.3 billion cattle and other ruminant livestock emit 60 million tons of methane through their digestive systems directly into the atmosphere each year. Moreover, to produce feed crops for cattle requires the use of petro-chemical fertilizers which emit vast amounts of nitrous oxide. These gases are building up in the atmosphere, blocking heat from escaping the planet, and could cause a global climate change of cataclysmic proportions in the next century.
Cattle and beef production is contributing significantly to the dramatic loss of biodiversity, including species extinction, now occurring across the globe. In all major cattle producing countries, wildlife habitat is being destroyed to create cattle pasture, as in the rain forests of Central America, or the huge cattle population is destroying habitat and using up food and water needed by wildlife. In the United States and Australia, cattle ranching has resulted in the purposeful mass extermination of predator and "nuisance" species -- a virtual war on wildlife. In Africa, millions of wild animals have died of thirst or starvation after finding their migratory paths blocked by fences built to contain cattle.
ANIMAL SUFFERING
Cattle are exposed to harsh living conditions, rough handling, and often outright abuse and cruelty throughout their short lives. Cattle are routinely castrated, dehorned, and hot-iron branded without anesthestics. Cattle released on the open range must fend for themselves for several months, often succumbing to weather extremes and other dangers. Animals transported to feedlots and slaughterhouses are often shocked with electric prods, beaten, kicked, dragged and deprived of food and water for long periods. Overcrowded trucks cause broken limbs; injured and sick animals are routinely dragged out of trucks and onto the kill floor where slaughter techniques remain primitive and brutal.
The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that the sickness, injury, and premature death of cattle represents an economic loss of $4.6 billion a year in the United States.
QUESTION AND ANSWER
Q. Don't people need to eat beef in order to stay healthy?
A. People don't need to eat beef or any other meat in order to stay healthy. In fact, just the opposite is true. There is abundant evidence which indicates that people who eat little or no, meat have fewer ilincsses and live longer than large consumers of meat.
People who eat little or no meat should eat a variety of other foods in order to meet their nutritional needs. However, the health risks of significantly reducing or eliminating animal- derived products from the diet are miniscule compared with those associated with overconsumption of beef and other meats. Those risks include heart disease, cancer and strokes. There has been no mass exodus to hospital emergancy rooms by vegetarians. However, 4,000 Americans suffer heart attacks every day -- many of them induced by the overconsumption of saturated fat and cholesterol.
In recent years, a growing number of physicians, athletes, bodybuilders, and others who are knowledgeable and concerned about health matters have reduced their consumption of meat or eliminated meat from their diets altogether.
Q. You're asking people to replace much of the beef in their diets with grains, vegetables, and fruits -- isn't Beyond Beef just a vegetarian campaign in disguise?
A. The Beyond Beef Campaign is advocating at least a 50 percent cut in beef consumption in order to reduce human hunger and poverty, environmental destruction, animal suffering, and damage to human health. Some members of the Beyond Beef coalition are vegetarians and advocate vegetarianism. Other coalition members are meat-eaters who see nothing wrong with eating small amounts of meat which has come from animals who have been humanely and sustainably raised under strict organic standards.
The beef we eliminate from our diets should not be replaced with another kind of grain-fed meat because the intensive production and consumption of other domestic animals also has many destructive effects. Eating high on the flood chain is cosly to the earth and its inhabitants.
If people reduce their beef consumption. replace at least half of the beef they used to eat with sustainably and organically raised grains, vegetables, legumes, and fruits, and refine their eating habits to select only humanely and sustainably raised beef when they do eat meat, the world and all its inhabitants will be much better off.
Q. Why does human hunger and malnutrition exist in a world of plenty?
A. There are many reasons why people are hungry; however, the misuse of agricultural land and the diversion of grain to feed livestock instead of people are primary causes of hunger in the world today.
Every nation on Earth has the resources -- enough good agricultural land -- to more than adequately feed its people. But much too much of that land is devoted to the grazing of cattle and other livestock, or to growing feed for livestock rather than food for people. Nearly half of the world's land is being used as pasture for cattle and other livestock. In addition, hundreds of millions of acres of arable land are being used to grow feed for livestock.
Even Ethiopia at the height of its famine in 1984 was using some of its arricultural land to produce linseed cake, cottonseed cake, and rapeseed meal for export to feed livestock in Europe.
Currently, one third of the world's grain is fed to livestock. In the United States, 70 percent of the grain produced is fed to livestock; and two thirds of all the grain the United States exports to other countries goes to feed livestock rather than hungry people.
This misappropiation of resources is the direct result of economic policies and programs adopted by the developing world at the urging of the industrial nations, multi-national corporations, and international aid-givers.
The United States has encouraged developing countries to climb the protein ladder in order to provide a marhet for surplus American grain. At the same time, developing countries have heen encouraged to enter the world commodities market with livestock feed to pay off their considerable debt to the first world. Today, production of livestock and livestock feed for the world market is supplanting the production of staple foods in many developing countries.
In Mexico, for example, where millions of people are chronically under-nourished, one third of the grain produced is fed to livestock. In Brazil, where 23 percent of the cultivated land is now being used to grow soybeans -- half of which is destined for export for livestock feed -- less land is available to grow corn and black beans, staples of the Brazilian peasant diet. The result has been less food at higher prices for an increasingly hungry and impoverished population.
Q. You claim that cattle are eating grain and other products such as soybeans that could feed hungry people. But don't cattle just eat materials that aren't fit for human consumption?
A. In the United States, the average animal in the feedlot system is fed about 42 percent forage with the remainder -- about 58 percent -- being grain.
During the first part of their lives, cattle are set loose on the range to graze on grasses and other plants inedible by humans. The average cow eats 900 pounds of vegetation a month.
Cattle are then transported to feedlots where they are fattened on grain. Today, more than 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States -- and one third of all the grain produced in the world is fed to cattle and other livestock. If the land used to produce feed grain were used to produce grain for human consumption, hundreds of millions of people could be fed.
Some cattle are also fed agricultural by-products. such as corn stalks, that are inedible by humans, as well as manure scrapings from hog and chicken intensive confinement "factory" farms. Some feedlots have begun experimenting feeding cattle cement dust, cardboard, paper, and industrial oils and wastes. Such "foods" do not deprive human beings of nourishment; however, it might be difficult to work up an appetite for beef raised on organic and industrial wastes.
Q. Isn't it true that only a tiny fraction of America's beef comes from the rain forests?
A. While less than 2 percent of all beef consumed in the United States comes from areas that were formerly Central American rain forests, this beef compromises most of Central America's beef exports. What is insignificant to the United States is of tremendous consequence to our southern neighbors.
Historically, the United States has been the largest consumer of Central American beef, a pattern that continues today. For example, 97 percent of Guatemala's beef exports go to the United States. Although our imports from the region as a whole have declined by more than 50 percent since 1975, the United States still imports considerable quantities of meat from Central America and southern Mexico. In 199O, those imports totaled about 50,000 tons of beef, enough to nnake more than 440 million quarter-pound hamburgers.
Although rain forest beef imports comprise only a fraction of all the beef, consumed in the United States, the environmental and human toll this "small" amount takes in Central America is enormous. Americans could easily forego the beef we import from Central America. Stopping our beef imports from this region, however, could save the remaining rain forests from further destruction and could make more land available to peasants for low-impact farming.
Q. Aren't uou overstating your claims that cattle contribute to global warming?
A. We don't think so. Cattle production contributes significantly to the production of three gases -- carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane -- whose build-up in the atmosphere blocks heat from leaving the earth and thereby causes global warming.
Large amounts of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere whenever forests and other biomass are burned to create cattle pasture. In 1987, about 1.2 hillion tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere from clearing and burning the forests of the Amazon, in large part to create pasture for cattle. In that year alone, deforestation in the Amazon contributed 9 percent of the total worldwide contribution to global warming from all sources. Additional gases are released by the annual burning of grasslands and agricultural wastes created by growing livestock feed.
More CO2 is created by our highly mechanized agriculture which uses up huge amounts of fossil fuels. With 70 percent of all U.S. grain production now devoted to livestock feed, the energy burned just to produce the feed represents a significant addition to CO2. It now takes the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grain-fed beef in the United States. To sustain the yearly beef habit of an average family of four requires the consumption of more than 260 gallons fuel. When that fuel is burned it releases 2.5 tons of additional carbon dioxide as much CO2 as the average car emits in six months.
Moreover, producing feed crops for grain-fed cattle requires the use of petrochemical fertilizers that emit nitrous oxide. In the past forty years, the use of chemical fertilizers has increased dramatically. Nitrous oxitie released from fertilizer and other sources now accounts for 6 percent of the global warming effect.
Finally, cattle emit methane, a potent global warming gas, through belching and fatulation. While methane is also emitted from peat bogs, rice paddies, and landfills, the increase in the livestock population and the burning of forests and other biomass accounts for much of the increase in methane emissions over the past several decades. Methane emissions are responsible for 18 percent of the global warming trend.
Because a methane molecule traps 25 times as much heat from the sun as a molecule of CO2 some scientists predict that methane may become the primary global warming gas in the next fifty years. Already, scientists estimate that more than 500 million tons of methane may be released into the air each year. The world's 1.3 billion cattle and other ruminant livestock emit about 60 million tons of the total, or 12 percent of all the methane released into the atmosphere. The burning of forests, grasslands, and agricultural wastes releases an additional 50 to 100 million tons of methane.
Q. You claim that cattle frequently withstand rough treatment and even cruelty. But don't beef producers' have to treat their animals well since they depend upon them for their livelihood?
A. Certainly it is in the producer's interest to bring healthy, intact animals to market; but for the most part, cattle producers' concern for animals begins and ends with profit. The beef industry is big business, and the animals unfortunate enough to be caught up in it are often treated as commodities, not as the sensitive living creatures they are. There is often a wide gap between the minimum care that producers' must provide to their animals in order to turn a profit and the actual needs of the animals.
Much of the suffering endured by cattle is inflicted simply to make life easier for ranchers. For example, castration, dehorning, and hot-iron branding -- all performed without anesthetics do not benefit the animals; they make the animals easier to control and identify. Cattle and other livestock also often withstand brutal handling; they are frequently shocked with electric prods, kicked, beaten, poked, and dragged.
Transportation of cattle and other farm animals is a major animal welfare problem. Overcrowded trucks, failure to properly water and reed the animals during long trips, exposure to temperature extremes en route, and rough handling result in millions of dollars of losses for the meat industry each year.
The industry does try to recoup as much of the loss as possible, however. "Downers," animals who are so badly injured during transportation they cannot walk off the trucks, are often chained by the neck or a leg and dragged to the slaughterhouse floor where they may wait hours in great pain to be butchered.
Animals who arrive at stockyards too sick to be slaughtered are often thrown onto what is called the "dead pile" and left to die of thirst, starvation, or freezing temperatures. All these abuses have been documented on videotape and on film by animal protection organizations.
Financial losses represented by thousands of sick and injured animals are merely written off by the industry as a cost of doing business. To humanely euthanize such animals would further cut into industry profits.
Q. If cattle and beef producers' treated their animals badly, wouldn't they be charged with cruelty under the anti-cruelty laws?
A. There is no federal law to ensure that famrm animals have proper care, suitable living conditions, or protection from abuse and cruelty.
0n the federal level, there are only two laws that pertain to farm animals: the Humane Slaughter Act and the Twenty-eight Hour Law. The first requires animals to be stunned before slaughter -- except for kosher and other religious slaughter. The second, which pertains only to the approximately 5 percent of animals who are transported by rail and over water, requires that animals be given rest food, and water if they are in transit more than twenty-eight hours.
The federal Animal Welfare Act specifically exempts from its protections animals used for food and fiber --- except when such animals are used in biomedical and other laboratory experiments.
Animals used for food and fiber are also speci fically exempted from many state anti-cruelty laws. In other states, beef industry husbandry and handling pactices that are considered routine -- such as castration without anesthesia, and even dragging downers to the slaughterhouse floor -- are either implicitly not covered by anti-cruelty laws or not enforced. Few prosecutors in cattle-producing states would consider bringing cruelty charges against powerful cattlemen.
In many states, if a cattle rancher were to treat his dog as he routinely treats his cattle, he would likely be arrested, tried, fined and/or imprisoned, and his dog would be confiscated. The uneven application of anti-cruelty laws reflects the blind eye that society casts toward animals used for food.
Q. How will the Beyond Beef campaign affect the family farm?
A. The family farm has been among the chief victims of the powerful beef industry lobby; every small farmer in America knows this. For years, the beef lobby has been able to secure cheap subsidized feed at the expense of American farmers whose costs of production often exceed the price of feed set by the government. Small scale ranchers are also exploited by the beef industry giants who are now able to control and manipulate the price of beef through various market arrangements.
While Beyond Beef is asking people to cut their beef consumption in half, the campaign is also encouraging consumers to demand humanely and sustainably raised beef when they do eat meat. The Beyond Beef campaign will help preserve the family farm by providing a new market niche for beef that has come from cattle who are humanely raised under sustainable, organic standards. It is impossible to raise cattle under such standards in giant corporate feedlots: only the family farm is capable of filling this new market. Small farmers are encouraged to make a transition to humane, sustainable husbantlry practices to fill this new and important need.
The Beyond Beef campaign is also advocating a bold new farm policy in the United States -- one that encourages a transition from feed to food production by rewarding the nation's small farmers with higher prices for growing food for human consumption. We believe that it is past time for the government to move its priorities away from policies and programs that subsidize feed for livestock and toward programs that subsidize food production for needy human beings, The Government should greatly expand its aid programs to distribute grain surpluses to needy people at home and abroad.
Q. What about beef industry workers?
Beef industry workers are among the most exploited inhumanely treated workers in the United States. Meat-packers, for example, suffer from one of the highest rates of injury of all occupations. Working conditions are often dehumanizing and primitive. Employee turnover is as high as 4.7 percent a month at some plants -- a situation that is often deliberately encouraged in order to discourage union activity. According to Eleanor Kennelly of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, "A meat- packing plant is like nothing you've ever seen or could imagine. it's like a vision of hell."
The Beyond Beef coalition believes that, given a choice of jobs, most workers would not choose to do the grisly, miserable, dangerous work of slaughtering and butchering animals. Beyond Beef supports extended employment compensation and free education and retraining, for all beef industry workers who lose their jobs as a result of a reduction in beef consumption. Beyond Reef supports union efforts to help their members and advocates the setting up of a "superfund" for all workers who are displaced as a result of enlightened social change and the enactment of environmental protection and other laws.
Q. How can reducing the amount of beef I eat contribute to solving the world's problems?
A. Cutting down on the number of hamburgers you eat won't solve all the world's problems -- but it would be a great start. One of the most eflective thing each of us can do to improve life on the planet is to reduce our consumption of meat -- especially beef.
Imagine what would happen if every American decided today to cut his or her beef consumption in half.
First, millions of animal lives would be spared. The average American currently consumes the meat of seven cows during his or her lifetime. By cutting our beef consumption in half, each of us would save at least three animals from being born into a life of suffering and violent death.
Next, our personal health would improve. By reducing beef consumption and replacing at least half the beef we eat with grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits, we would reduce our intaks of saturated fat and cholesterol and thereby reduce the likelihood of developing, and dying from, heart disease, cancer, and other ailments. We would feel better, live longer, and the nation's health costs would plummet.
The global environment would also benefit. The beef-production assault would slow, and the world's forests, soil, water, air, and species would have a reprieve -- a chance to regenerate themselves.
A 50 percent reduction in beef consumption would also free more agricultural land that could be used to grow food for hungry people. And cutting U.S. beef imports in half would help free some lands around the world for use by indigenous populations to grow their own food.
Many Americans have been looking for a way to make a personal contribution to the wellbeing of the planet. Reducing our consumption of beef is an empowering and powerful act. By changing our diets, we can change the world.
FACT SHEET: ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION
THE REAL COSTS OF BEEF:
ENVIRONMENTAL
DEVASTATION
Cattle and beef production is a primary threat to the global environment. It is a major contributor to deforestation, soil erosion and desertification, water scarcity, water pollution, depletion of fossil fuels, global warming, and loss of biodiversity.
Deforestation
* Cattle ranching is a primary cause of deforestation in Latin America. Since 1960, more than one quarter of all Central. American forests have been razed to make pasture for cattle. Nearly 70 percent of deforested land in Panama and Costa Pica is now pasture.1
* Some 40,000 square miles of Amazon forest were cleared for cattle ranching and other commercial development between 1966 and 1983. Brazil estimates that 38 percent of its rain forest was destroyed for cattle pasture.2
* Just one quarter-pound hamburger imported from Latin America requires the clearing of 6 square yards of rain forest and the destruction of 165 pounds of living matter including 20 to 30 different plant species, 100 insect species, and dozens of bird, mammal, and reptile species. 3
Soil Erosion and Desertification
* Cattle production is turning productive land into barren desert in the American West and throughout the world. Soil erosion and desertification is caused directly by cattle and other livestock overgrazing. Overcultivation of the land, improper irrigation techniques, and deforestation are also principal causes of erosion and desertification, and cattle production is a primary factor in each case.
* Cattle degrade the land by stripping vegetation and compacting the earth. Each animal foraging on the open range eats 900 pounds of vegetation every month. Their powerful hoofs trample vegetation and crush the soil with an impact of 24 pounds per square inch.4
* As much as 85 percent of U.S. western rangeland, nearly 685 million acres, is being degraded by overgrazing and other problems, according to a 1991 United Nations report. The study estimates that 430 million acres in the American West is suffering a 25 to 50 percent yield reduction, largely because of overgrazing.5
* The United States has lost one third of its topsoil. An estimated six of the seven billion tons of eroded soil is directly attributable to grazing and unsustainable methods of producing feed crops for cattle and other livestock.6
* Each pound of feedlot steak costs about 35 pounds of eroded American topsoil, according to the Worldwatch Institute.7
Water Scarcity
* Nearly half of the total amount of water used annually in the U. S. goes to grow feed and provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock. Producing a pound of grain-fed steak requires the use of hundreds of gallons of water. Producing a pound of beef protein often requires up to fifteen times more water than producing an equivalent amount of plant protein.8
* U.S. fresh water reserves have declined precipitously as a result of excess water use for cattle and other livestock. U.S. water shortages, especially in the West, have now reached critical levels. Overdrafts now exceed replenishments by 25 percent.9
* The great Ogallala aquifer, one of the world's largest fresh water reserves, is already half depleted in Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico. In California. where 42 percent of irrigation water is used for feed or livestock production, water tables have dropped so low that in some areas the earth is sinking under the vacuum. Some U.S. reservoirs and aquifers are now at their lowest levels since the end of the last Ice Age.11
Water Pollution
* Organic waste from cattle and other livestock, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and agricultural salts and sediments are the primary non-point source of water pollution in the U.S.11
* Cattle produce nearly 1 billion tons of organic waste each year. The average feedlot steer produces more than 47 pounds ofmanure every twenty-four hours. Nearly 500,000 pounds of manure are produced daily on a standard 10,000- head feedlot. This is the rough equivalent of what a city of 110,000 would produce in human waste. There are 42,000 feedlots in 13 U.S. states.12
Depletion of Fossil Fuels
* Intensive animal agriculture uses a dis proportionate amount of fossil fuels. Supplying the world with a typical American meat-based diet would deplete all world oil reserves in just a few years.13
* It now takes the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grainfed beef in the United States. The annual beef consumption of an average American family of four requires more than 260 gallons of fuel and releases 2.5 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, as much as the average car over a six month period.14
Global Warming
* Cattle and beef production is a significant factor in the emission of three of the four global warming gases -- carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane.15
* Much of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is directly attributable to beef production: burning forests to make way for cattle pasture and burning massive tracts of agricultural waste from cattle feed crops. When the fifty-five square feet of rain forest needed to produce one quarter-pound hamburger is burned for pasture, 500 pounds of CO2 is released into the atmosphere.16
* CO2 is also generated by the fuel used in the highly mechanized agricultural production of feed crops for cattle and other livestock. With 70 percent of all U.S. grain production now used for livestock feed, the CO2 emitted as a direct result is significant.17
* Petrochemical fertilizers used to produce feed crops for grain-fed cattle release nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Worldwide, the use of fertilizers has increased dramatically from 14 million tons in 1950 to 143 million tons in 1989. Nitrous oxide now accounts for 6 percent of the global warming effect.18
* Cattle emit methane, another greenhouse gas, through belching and flatulation. Scientists estimate that more than 500 million tons of methane are released each year and that the world's 1.3 billion cattle and other ruminant livestock emit approximately 60 million tons or 12 percent of the total from all sources. Methane is a serious problem because one methane molecule traps 25 times as much solar heat as a molecule of CO2.19
Loss of Biodiversity
* U.S. cattle production has caused a significant loss of biodiversity on both public and private lands. More plant species in the U.S. have been eliminated or threatened by livestock grazing than by any other cause, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO).20
* Riparian zones -- the narrow strips of land that run alongside rivers and streams where most of the range flora and fauna are concentrated -- have been the hardest hit by cattle grazing. More than 90 percent of the original riparian zones of Arizona and New Mexico are gone, according to the Arizona State Park Department. Colorado and Idaho have also been hard hit. The GAO reports that "poorly managed livestock grazing is the major cause of degraded riparian habitat on federal rangelands."21
* Unable to compete with cattle for food, wild animals are disappearing from the rangs. Pronghorn have decreased from 15 million a century ago to less than 271,000 today. Bighorn sheep, once numbering over 2 million, are now less than 20,000. The elk population has plummeted from 2 million to less than 455,000.22
* The government has worked with ranchers to make cattle grazing the predominant use of Western public lands. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has long favored ranching over other uses. BLM sprays herbicides over large tracts of range eliminating vegetation eaten by wild animals and replacing it with monocultures of grasses favored by cattle.23
* Under pressure from ranchers, the U.S. government exterminates tens of thousands of predator and "nuisance" animals each year. In 1989, a partial list of animals killed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal Damage Control Program included 86,502 coyotes, 7,158 foxes, 236 black bears, 1,220 bobcats, and 80 wolves. In 1988, 4.6 million birds, 9,000 beavers, 76,000 coyotes, 5,000 raccoons, 300 black bears, and 200 mountain lions, among others, were killed. Some 400 pet dogs and 100 cats were also inadvertently killed. Extermination methods used include poisoning, shooting, gassing, and burning animals in their dens.24
* The predator "control" program cost American taxpayers $29.4 million in 1990 -- more than the amount of losses caused by wild animals.25
* Tens of thousands of wild horses and burros have been rounded up by the federal government because ranchers claim they compete with their cattle for forage. The horses and burros are held in corrals, costing taxpayers millions of dollars per year. Many wild horses have ended up at slaughterhouses.
* For several years, cattle ranchers have blocked efforts to re-introduce the wolf, an endangered species, into the wild, as required by the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
FOOTNOTES
* <1> Catherine Caulfield, "A Reporter at Large: The Rain Forests." New Yorker, January 14, 1985, 79.
* <2> Ibid, 49.
* <3> Julie Denslow and Christine Padoch, People of the Tropical Rainforest (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1988), 169.
* <4> John Lancaster, "Public Land. Private Profit," Washington Post, A1, A8. A9; Lynn Jacobs, Waste of the West. Puhlic Lands Ranching (Lynn Jacobs: Tuscon. AZ, 1991). 15.
* <5> Myra Klockenbrinli, "The New Range War Has the Desert As Foe," New York Times. August 20, 1991, G4.
* <6> Frances Moore Lappe Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 80.
* <7> Alan Durning, "Cost of Beef for Health and Habitat," Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1986, V3.
* <8> Lappe, Dietfor a Small Planer, 76-77.
* <9> David Pimentel and Carl W. Hall. Food and Natural Resources (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989),41.
* <10> Sandra Postel, Water: Rethinking Management in an Age of Scarcity, Worldwatch Paper 61 (1984), 20.
* <11> Pimentel and Hall, 89.
* <12>M. E. Ensminger, Animal Science (Danville, IL: Interstate Publishers, 1991), 187, table 5-9: Based on analysis by John Sweeten, Texas A&M, for the National Cattlemen's Association, 1990.
* <13> Pimentel and Hall, 35.
* <14> Alan Duming, "Cost of Beef For Health and Habitat," Los Angeles Times, 3; Based on 65 pounds of beef consumed per person per year. The auto CO2 emissions comparisons come from Andrew Kimbrell, "On the Road," in Jeremy Rifkin, ed., The Green Lifestyle Handbook (New York, NY:Henry Holt and Co., 1990), 33-42.
* <15> Fred Pearce, "Methane: The Hidden Greenhouse Gas," New Scientist, May 6, 1989; Alan Duming and Holly Brough, Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, (Washington D.C.: Worldwatch Institute), 17; World Resources Institute, World Resources 1990-91, 355.
* <16> Greenhouse Crisis Statistical Review, Sources: World Resources Institute, Rainforssr Action Network. U.S. Department of Agriculture. and Worldwatch Institute in U.S. News and World Report, Oct 31, 1988.
* <17> David Pimentel, "Waste in Agriculture and Food Sectors: Environmental and Social Costs," paper for Gross National Waste Product Forum, Arlington. VA. 1989, 9-10. Pimentel concludes that substituting a grass feeding livestock system for the present grain and grass system would reduce energy inputs about 60 percent.
* <18> Lester Brown et al., State of the World 1990 (New Yorer, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990), 67; Fred Pearce, 38.
* <19> Fred Pearce, 37; Methane emissions from live stock from World Resources Institute et al. 1990-91. 346. Table 24.1; Cattle emissions as a per cent of livestock emissions from Michael Gibbs and Kathleen Hogan, "Methane," EPA Journal, March/April 1990.
* <20> George Wuerthner. "The Price is Wrong," Sierra, September/October 1990. 40-41.
* <21> Wuerthner, 40: Jon Luoma. "Discouraging Words," Audubon, September 1986,92.
* <22> Wuerthner, 41-42; Denzel Ferguson and Nancy Ferguson. Sacrcd Cows At The Puhlic Trough, (Bend. OR: Maverick Publications. 1983). 116.
* <23> Ferguson and Ferguson, 158; Lynn Jacobs, 237.
* <24> Keith Schneider, "Mediating the Federal War of the Jungle," New York Times, July 9. 1991,4E; Carol Grunewald, ed, Animal Activist Alert, 8:3 (Washington D.C.: Humane Society of the United States, 1990), 3.
* <25> Carol Grunewald, ed, Animal Activist Alert, 8:3, 3.
FACT SHEET: DAMAGED HEALTH
THE REAL COSTS OF BEEF:
DAMAGED HEALTH
Beef contains high levels of cholesterol and saturated fat and is frequently contaminated by chemicals and disease. Beef may be one of the more unhealthy foods on the market today.
* Nearly 70 percent, or 1.5 million of the 2.1 million deaths in the United States in 1987, were from diseases associated with diet -- particularly diets high in saturated fat and cholesterol, according to a U.S. Surgeon General's report.1
* Many scientific studies have found a high correlation between the consumption of red meat -- which is high in saturated fats and cholesterol -- and heart disease, stroke. and colon and breast cancer.2
* In 1990, the largest study ever done on the health effects of consuming animalderived foods confirmed the results of previous studies showing a high correlation between meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer. Participating reseachers followed the eating habits of 6,500 people living in twenty-five procinces in China.3
* The Chinese study found that Chinese consume 20 percent more calories than Americans, but that Americans are 25 percent fatter. That's because 37 percent of the calories in the U.S. diet comes from fat, whereas less than 15 percent of the calories in the rural Chinese diet comes from far. The study also found that 70 percent of the protein in the U'estern diet conies from animal sources and 30 percent from plants. In China, only 11 percent comes from animal products and 89 percent from plants.4
* The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are just a few of the medical, scientific, and professional associations that recommend a reduction in the consumption of red meat and other animal-derived foods and a shift to a more vegetarian diet.5
* Beef contains the highest concentration of herbicides of any food sold in America, according to the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences. Eighty percent of all the herbicides used in the U.S. are sprayed on corn and soybeans, which are used primarily as feed for cattle. When consumed by cattle, the chemicals accumulate in their bodies and are passed onto consumers in finished cuts of beef.6
* Beef ranks second only to tomatoes as the food posing the greatest cancer risk due to pesticide contamination. It ranks third of all foods in insecticide contamination. Of all food on the market today, pesticide-tainted beef represents nearly 11 percent of the total cancer risk to consumers from pesticides, according to the NRC.7
* More than 95 percent of all feedlot- raised cattle in the United States are currently receiving growth-promoting hormones and other pharmaceuticals, residues of Which may be present in finished cuts of beef.8
* In order to speed weight gain, feedlot managers administer growth-stimulating hormones and feed additives. Anabolic steroids, in the form of small time-release pellets, are implanted in the animals' ears. The hormones slowly seep into the bloodstream, increasing hormone levels by two to five times. Cattle are given estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone.9
* In 1988, more than 15 million pounds of antibiotics were used as feed additives for livestock in the United States. The drugs were used to promote growth and fight the diseases which run rampant in cramped. contaminated pens and feedlots. While the cattle industry claims that it has discontinued the widespread use of antibiotics in cattle feed, antibiotics are still being given to dairy cows, which account for 15 percent of all beef consumed in the United States. Antibiotic residues often show up in the meat people consume, making the human population increasingly vulnerable to more virulent strains of disease-causing bacteria.10
* Veal calves are so sick that antibiotics and other drugs are routinely used to keep many of them alive until slaughter. Contrary to veal industry claims, no drugs have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in formulafed veal calves. Some of the drugs used routinely, such as sulfamethazine, are carcinogenic. Drug residues are often present in veal purchased by consumers.11
* In a 1985 report, the National Academy of Sciences announced that current federal meat inspection procedures are inadequate to protect the public from meat-related diseases, and recommended ameliorative steps which have never been adopted. Instead, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), working with the meat-packing industry, developed a new, experimental inspection system -- the Streamlined Inspection System (SIS)-- the goal of which is to increase online meat production by up to 40 percent.12
* The SIS virtually eliminates the role of the federal meat inspector by placing responsibility for carcass inspection on packing house employees. Federal meat inspectors no longer inspect every carcass on the production line; instead, they examine less than one percent of the carcasses.13
* Under the SIS, thousands of carcasses with pneumonia, measles, and other diseases, peritonitis, abcesses, fecal and insect contamination, and contaminated heads (called "puke heads" because they are filled with rumen content) are passing through inspection on their way to dinner tables across the country.14
* In 1990, federal meat inspectors from across the country flooded the USDA with affidavits describing major problems throughout the new SIS system. Recently, USDA inspectors sent a letter to the National Academy of Sciences raising concerns about the wholesomeness of the U.S. beef supply.15
* Recent discoveries have suggested a possible link between new cattle diseases and disease in humans. Bovine leukemia virus (BLV), an insect-borne retrovirus that causes malignancy in cattle and which can be found in 20 percent of cattle and 60 percent of herds in the United States, is suspected of having a causal link to some forms of human leukemia. BLV antibodies have been found in human leukemia patients and BLV has infecfed human cells in vitro.16
* Bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV), which was discovered to be widespread in American cattle herds in the 1980s, genetically resembles the human HIV (AIDS) virus and, like the AIDS virus in humans, is believed to suppress the immune systems of cattle, making them susceptible to a wide range of diseases and infections. Scientists have successfully infected human cells with BIV, and at least one study suggested that BIV "may play a role in either malignant or slow viruses in man." In 1991,the USDA stated that it does not yet know "whether exposure to BIV proteins causes human sera to... become HIV positive."17
* The beef packing industry has the second highest rate of injury in American industry -- three times the national average. Injury rates in some plants exceed 85 percent, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.18
FOOTNOTES
* <1> Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1988. Pub. no. 88-50210.
* <2> George A Bray, "Overweight is Risking Fate..." in Richard J. Wurtman and Judith Wunman, eds. Human Obesity, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 45)0 (1987). 21; Gina Kolata, "Animal Fat is Tied To Colon Cancer," New York Times, December 13, 1990; Waiter Willett et al.. "Relationship of Meat, Fat, and Fiber Intake to the Risk of Colon Cancer in Prospective Study Among Women," New England Journal of Medicine, 333:24 (1990), 1663; J. Raloff, "Breast Cancer Rise: Due to Dietary Fat?" Science News, April 21, 1(1)90. 215; Ibid.. 302: Geoffrey Howe et al.. "A Conort Study of Fat Intake and the Risk of Breast Cancer." Journal of National Cancer Institute, 85:5 (March 6, 1991).
* <3> Jane E. Brody, ''Huge Study of Diet Indicts Fat and Meat," New York Times, May 8, 1990, C1.
* <4> Nanci Hellmich, "In Healthful Living. East Beats West," USA Today, June 6, 1990; Anne Simon Moffat, "China: A Living Lab for Epidemology," Science 248, May 4, 1990. 554.
* <5> Quoted in Dorothy Mayes, "3 Ounces Per Day," Beef, April 1989, 33; Quoted in K.A. Fackelman, "Health Groups find Consensus on Fat in Diet," Science News 137, March 3, 1990, 132.
* <6> National Research Council, Board on Agriculture, Alternative Agriculture, 44; National Research Council, Board on Agriculture, Regularing Pesticides in Food, 78. Table 3-20 to 22.
* <7> National Research Council, Board on Agriculture, Regulating Pesticides in Food, 78-80, Tables 3-20 to 22.
* <8> Fred Kuchler et al. "Regulating Food Safety: The Case of Animal Gronth Hormones," National Food Review July-December 1989, 26.
* <9> Jim Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York. NY: Harmony· Books, 1990), 51; Jeannine Kenney and Dick Fallert, "Livestock Hormone in the United States," National Food Review, July-September 1989, 22-23.
* <10> Mason and Singer, Animal Factories, 70, 83-84; FDA Veterinarian, ''Antihiotics in Animal Feeds Risk Assessment," May/June 1989.
* <11> Mason and Singer, Animal Factories, 81-89.
* <12> Quoted in commentary from Carol Foreman to Linda Carey, May 15, 1989, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service, Public Docket No. 83-008P, 53 Federal Register 48262, November 30. 1988, Public Comments on Food Safety and Inspection Service Proposed Rule on Streamlined Inspection System for Meat Safety, 5; Government Accountability Project. Fact Sheet on Streamlined Inspection System, August 16, 1989, 1.
FACT SHEET: GLOBAL HUNGER AND POVERTY
THE REAL COSTS OF BEEF:
GLOBAL HUNGER AND
POVERTY
Beef production causes human hunger and poverty by diverting grain and cropland to support livestock instead of people. In developing countries, beef production perpetuates and intensifies poverty and injustice, particularly if beef or livestock feed is produced for export.
* Seventy percent of all U.S. grain -- and one third of the world's total grain harvest -- is fed to cattle and other livestock. At the same time, between 40 and 60 million people die each year from hunger and diseases related to hunger. As many as one billion suffer from chronic hunger and malnourishment.1
* U.S. livestock -- mostly cattle -- consumes almost twice as much grain as is eaten by the entire American population. Globally, about 600 million tons of grain are fed to livestock, much of it to cattle.2
* Two-thirds of all U.S. grain exports foes to feed cattle and other livestock rather than hungry people.3
* In Africa, nearly one in three people is undernourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 22 percent of the people live at the edge of starvation. In the Near East, one in nine is underfed.4
* Chronic hunger and related disease affect more than 1.3 billion people, according to the World Health Organization. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species -- more than 20 percent -- been undernourished.5
* Undernutrition affects nearly 40 percent of all children in developing nations and contributes directly to an estimated 60 percent of all childhood deaths, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. More than 15 million children die every year from diseases resulting from, or complicated by, undernourishment.6
* If worldwide agricultural production were shifted fron? livestock feed to food grains for direct human consumption, more than a billion people could be fed -- the precise number which currently suffer from hunger and malnourishment.8
* Feeding grain to livestock is an extremely wasteful method of producing protein. Feedlot cattle require nine pounds of feed to make one pound of gain. Only 11 percent of the feed goes to produce the beef itself. The rest is burned off as energy in the conversion process, used to maintain normal body functions, absorbed into parts of the cattle that are not eaten -- such as hair or bones -- or excreted.8
* Cattle have a feed protein conversion efficiency of only 6 percent, producing less than 50 kg of flesh protein from more than 790 kg of plant protein. A feedlot steer consumes 2,700 pounds of grain by the time it is ready for slaughter.9
* Asian adults consume between 300 and 400 pounds of grain a year; three-fourths or more of the diet of the average Asian is composed of grain. A middle-class American, by contrast, consumes over a ton of grain each year, 80 percent of it through eating cattle and other grain-fed livestock.10
* Two out of every three people around the world consume a primarily vegetarian diet. With one-third of global grain output now going to cattle and other livestock, and with the human population growing by almost 20 percent in the next decade, a worldwide food crisis is imminent.11
* Three quaners of America's public western land -- covering 40 percent of the eleven western statss -- is leased to cattlemen at prices far below market value.12
* Nearly half of the earth's landmass is used as pasture for cattle and other livestock. On very rich grasslands, two and a half acres can support a cow for a year. On marginal grazing land, 50 or more acres may be required.13
* In the 1960s, with the help of loans from the World Bank and the Inter- American Development Bank, many Central and South America governments began converting millions of acres of tropical rain forest and cropland to pastureland for the international beef market. Between 1971 and 1977, more than $3.5 billion in loans and technical assistance went to Latin America for cattle production.14
* Many major U.S. corporations invested heavily in beef production throughout Central America in the 1970s and 80s, including Borden, United Brands, and International Foods. Other American multinational companies such as Cargill, Ralston Purina, W.R. Grace, Weyerhauser-, Crown Zellerbach, and Fort Dodge Labs, provided most of the technological support for the Central American beef industry, from frozen semen to refrigeration equipment, grass seeds, feed, and medicine. 15
* The beef industry in Central America has enriched the lives of a select few, pauperized much of the rural peasantry, and spawned widespread social unrest and political upheaval. More than half the rural families in Central America -- 35 million people -- are now landless or own too little land to support themselves, while powerful ranchers and large corporations continue to acquire more land for pasture.16
* In Costa Rica, cattle interests cleared 80 percent of the tropical forests in just 20 years, turning half the arable land into cattle pastures. Today, just 2,000 powerful ranchincg families own over half the productive land in Costa Rica, grazing 2 million cattle most of whose meat is exported to the United States.17
* In Guatemala, less than 3 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the agriculitural land, much of it used for raising cattle. Nearly one third of Guatemala's beef production was exported to the U.S. in 1990.18
* In Honduras, land used for cattle pasture increased from just over 40 percent in 1952 to more than 60 percent in 1974. Total beef production tripled between 1960 and 1980 to over 62,000 metric tons annually. In 1990, more than 30 percent of the beef produced in Honduras was exported to the United States.19
* In Nicaragua, beef production increased threefold and beef exports increased five and a half times between 1960 and 1980.20
* By the mid 1980s, Central America had 80 percent more cattle than 20 years before, and produced 170 percent more beef.21
* In Brazil, 4.5 percent of the landowners own 81 percent of the farmland, while 70 percent of the rural households are landless. Between 1966 and 1983, nearly 40,000 square miles of Amazon forest were cleared for commercial development. The Brazilian government estimated that 38 percent of all the rain forest destroyed during that period was attributable to large-scale cattle development benefitting only a few wealthy ranchers.22
* In developing countries, the poor receive no benefit from cattle ranching. Modern beef production is capital intensive but not labor intensive. The average rain forest cattle ranch employs one person per 2,000 head of cattle, or about one person per twelve square miles. By contrast, peasant agriculture can often sustain a hundred people per square mile.23
* Latin American countries are using more of their land to graze cattle, and to grow feed crops. In Mexico, where millions of people are malnourished, one-third of the grain produced is being fed to livestock. Twenty-five years ago, livestock consumed less than 6 percent of Mexico's grain.24
* When land in developing countries is used to produce livestock feed, much of it for export, less land is available to peasant farmers to grow their own food, and so less food is available. As a result, staple food prices rise, and the impact is mostly felt by the poor. In Brazil, black beans, long a staple food for the poor, are becoming more expensive as farmers have switched to growing soybeans for the more lucrative international feed market.25
FOOTNOTES
* <1> U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, WASDE-256, Tables 256-6, -7, -16, -19. -23, World Bank, Poverty and Hunger (Washington DC: World Bank, 1986), 24: Susan Oakie. "Health Crisis Confronts 1.3 Billion," Washington Post, September 25, 1989, A1.
* <2> USDA, Economic Research Service, World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimares, WASDE-256, Tables 256-6, -7, -16, -19, -23; World Bank, Poverty. and Hunger. (Washington DC: World Bank, 1986), 24. For two times the entire American population see USDA figures. For third world grain production see World Bank report.
* <3> USDA, Economic Research Service, WASDE 256-6,-16.
* <4> World Resources Institute, World Resources 1990-91, 87; CTnited Nations World Food Council, "The Global State of Hunger and Malnutrition and the Impact of Economic Adjustment on Food and Hunger," World Food Council, Thirteenth Ministerial Session, Report by the Secretariat, Beijing, China, 1987, 16.
* <5> Susan Okie, Al.
* <6> Katrina Galway et al., Child Survival: Risks and the Road to Health; (Columbia, MD: Institute for Resource Development, 1987), 31.
* <7> David Pimentel. Food Energy And The Future of Society (New York: Wiley, 1979), 26. U.S Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, WASDE-256, July 11, 1991,table 256-6; World Bank, Poverty and Hunger (Washington DC: World Bank, 1986). 24. Pimentel estimates that a conversion of the present American grass/grain livestock system to a totally grass-fed system would free up in the United States alone about 130 million tons of grain for direct human consumption, enough to feed about 400 million people. Today worldwide, about one-third of the 1.7 billion metric tons of total grain production is fed to livestock, which would suggest, using Pimentel's rationale, that a totally grass-fed livestock system worldwide might free enough grain up to feed over a billion people.
* <8> M.E. Ensminger, Animal Science (Danville, IL: Interstate Publishers, 1991). 23, fig 1-25, 20.
* <9> David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel, Fond Energy and Society (New York: Wiley, 1979), 58; Ensminger, 23:"Assuming a feeding period of 140 davs and a gain of 450 pounds in the lot, the total market weight (10501h) would represent 2.57 Ib of feed grain expended for each pound of gain (450 x 6 =2,700)."
* <10> Paul Ehrlich et al., Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. 1977), 315: Ensminger 20, 27; Pimentel et al., " Energy and Land Constraints in Food Protein production." Science, issue 190; 754.
* <11> David Pimentel and Carl W. Hall, eds., Food and Natural Resources (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), 38; Jack Doyle, Altered Harvest (New York, NY: Viking/Penguin, 1985), 288; Lester Brown et al., Stare of the World 1990 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990), 5, table 1-1.
* <12> Ensminger, 22; Lynn Jacobs, "Amazing Graze: How the Livestock Industry is Ruining the American West." in Desertification ControlBullerin. No. 17 (Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Program, 1988); Public Lands Ranching Statistics.l990 (Free Our Public Lands. P.O Box 5784, Tuscon AZ 85703).
* <13> Paul Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 35; David Pimentel and Carl Hall, eds. Food and Natural Resources, 80.
* <14> Office of Technology Assessment, Technologies to Sustain Tropical Forest Resources, U.S. Congress, OTA-F-214, March 1984, Forest Resources, 96-97.
* <15> Tom Barry, Roots of Rebellion (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 84.
* <16> Norman Myers, The Primary Source (New York: W.W. Nonon, 1983), 133.
* <17> Catherine Caulfield, "A Reporter at Large: The Rain Forests," New Yorker, Jan. 14, 1985, 79; Norman Meyers, 134.
* <18> Norman Meyers, 133; export and production figures from USDA, Foreign Agriculture Service as Summarized by Scott Lewis, "The Hamburger Connection Revisited," Rainforest Action Network, San Francisco, 1991.
* <19> Billie DeWalt. "The Cattle are Eating the Forest," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1983, 19; Export and production figures from USDA, Foreign Agriculture Service as summarized by Scott Leuis.
* <20> Meyers 133; Export figures from USDA.
* <21> DeWalt, 19.
* <22> Caulfield. 49; lames Parsons, "The Scourge of Cows." Whole Earth Review, Spring 1988, 43.
* <23> Caulfield, 80.
* <24> David Barkin and Billie DeWalt. "Sorghum, the Internationalization of Capital and the Mexican Food Crisis," paper presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting. Denver, November 16 1983. 16; acreage figures from Scott Lewis, "The Hamburger Connection Revisited..."; grain figures from Barkin and DeWalt. p16; Steven Sanderson. The Transformation ofMesican Agriculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
* <25> Associacao Promorora de Estudus da Economica, A Economica Brasil-eira e Suas perspectives. Apecan XXIX, 1990 (Rio de Janeiro: APEC. 1990). 5. FAO of the United Nations, Trade, Commerce. Commercio. 1989 Yearbook (Rome:Italy: FAO, 1990) Vol 43, 29; Femando Homen de Melo, "Unbalanced Technological Change and Income Disparity in a Semi-Open Economy: The Case of Brazil," in Tullis F. Lammond and W. Ladd Hollist, eds. Food, State, and International Political Economy (Lincoln:University of Nebraska, 1986), 262-275..
QUOTABLE QUOTES
HEALTH
"If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero."
-- WALTER WILLETT, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital,
director of a study that found a close correlation between red
meat consumption and colon cancer
"Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go....We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods....
"Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's when the mischief starts."
-- T. COLIN CAMPBELL, PH.D., of Cornell University, director of
a study of 6,500 Chinese that found a close correlation between
meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."
-- NEAL. D. BARNARD, M.D., President, Physicians Committee
for Responsihle Medicine. Washington, D.C.
"When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings."
-- William C. Roberts, M.D., editor ofThe American Journal
of Cardiology
"All red meat contains saturated fat. There is no such thing as truly lean meat. Trimming away the edge ring of fat around a steak really does not lower the fat content significantly. People who have red meat (trimmed or untrimmed) as a regular feature of their diets suffer in far greater numbers from heart attacks and strokes."
-- MICHAEL KLAPER, M.D., Medical Director,
EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California
"The thousands of people who have suffered food poisoning after eating beef will, no doubt, appreciate that their beef was aesthetically acceptable, even though it made them ill. 'Lovely to look at, dangerous to eat' is not a standard that is likely to help beef sales."
-- CAROL TUCKER FOREMAN, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture
during the Carter administration, commenting on the inadequacy
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Streamlined (Meat)
inspection System (SIS)
"As happened with tobacco, health warnings about meat eating are multiplying, and awareness of the environmental effects of meat production is rising. Just as cigarettes lost their allure, meat is losing its social cachet in some countries. Food marketers in the United Kingdom estimate that 2 million people in that country are strict vegetarians. More important, the number of people limiting meat in their diets is rising rapidly. An estimated 6 million people in the United Kingdom dine on meatless meals most of the time."
-- ALAN B. DURNING AND HOLLY B. BROUGH, in Taking Stock:
Animal Farming and the Environment, Worldwatch Institute,
Washington, D.C., 1991
ENVIRONMENT
"An alien ecologist observing... Earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant animal species in our biosphere."
-- DAVID HAMILTON WRIGHT, PH.D., Emery University biologist
"The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined."
-- PHILIP FRADKIN in Audubon, National Audubon Society,
New York, New York
"Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest, are what you might call 'cow burnt.' Almost anywhere and everywhere you goin the American West you find hordes of ....They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West Stinks of cattle."
-- The late EDWARD ABBEY, conservationist and author, in a
speech before cattlemen at the University of Montana in 1985
"You can buy the land out there now for the same price as a couple of bottles of beer per acre. When you've got half a million acres and 20,000 head of cattle, you can leave the lousy place and go live in Paris, Hawaii, Switzerland, or anywhere you choose."
-- American rancher who owns grazing land in the Amazon,
descrihing the attitude of cattle colonists in the Brazilian rain
forest
"We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars 'made sense' only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat 'makes sense' only because the true costs of producing it are not counted."
-- FRANCES MOORE LAPPE , in Diet for a Small Planet
"A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. Our choices do matter. What's healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life support system of our precious, but wounded planet."
-- JOHN ROBBINS, author of Diet for a New America, and
President, EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California
HUNGER AND POVERTY
"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."
-- JEREMY RIFKIN, author of Beyond Beef, The Rise and Fall of
the Cattle Culture, and President of the Greenhouse Crisis
Foundation, Washington, D.C.
"A meat-fed world now appears a chimera. World grain production has grown more slowly than population since 1984, and farmers lack new methods for repeating the gains of the 'green revolution.' Supporting the world's current population of 5.4 bilion people on an American-style diet would require two-and-a-half times as much grain as the world's farmers produce for all purposes. A future world of 8 billion to 14 billion people eating the American ration of 220 grams of grain-fed meat a day can be nothing but a flight of fancy."
-- ALAN B. DURNING AND HOLLY B. BROUGH,
Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C.
"There can be no question that more hunger can be alleviated with a given quantity of grain by completely eliminating animals . About 2,000 pounds of concentrates must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc.) eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is first fed to livestock and then is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products...."
-- M.E. ENSMINGER, PH.D., internationally recognized animal
agriculture specialist, former Department of Animal Science
Chairman at Washington State University, currently President of,
Consultants-Agriservices , Clovis, California
"Changing eating habits in the North is an important link in the chain of events needed to create environmentally sustainable development that meets people's needs. The Beyond Beef campaign is an important step in that direction."
-- DR. WALDEN BELLO, Executive Director, Food First/The
Institute for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco,
California
"Suppose food were distributed equally. If everyone in the world ate as Americans do, less than half the present world population could be fed on the record harvests of 1985 and 1986. Of course, everyone doesn't have to eat like Americans. About a third of the world grain harvest -- the staples of the human feeding base -- is fed to animals to produce eggs, milk, and meat for American- style diets. Wouldn't feeding that grain directly to people solve the problem? If everyone were willing to eat an essentially vegetarian diet, that additional grain would allow perhaps a billion more people to be fed with 1986 production."
-- PAUL R. EHRLICH AND ANNE H. EHRLICH, authors Of
The Population Explosion, 1990
"Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the Beef Cartel the biggest hog at the trough."
-- HOWARD LYMAN, Executive Director, Beyond Beef
campaign, former senior lobbyist for the National Farmers
Union
ANIMAL SUFFERING
"In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the physical abuse of livestock during transportation.... Typical abuses I have witnessed with alarming frequency are: hitting, beating, use of badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and deliberate cruelty."
-- TEMPLE GRANDIN, PH.D., internationally recognized livestock
handling consultant and hoard memher of the meat industry's
Livestock Conservation Institute
"For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with non-human animals is at meal time: we eat them....The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment."
-- PETER SINGER, author of Animal Liberation, and professor of
philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
"The amount of meat lost each year through careless handling and brutality would be enough to feed a million Americans for a year.
-- JOHN MCFARLANE, Executive Director, The Council for
Livestock Protection, a meat industry organization
"I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life."
--ALICE WALKER, author and poet
"in fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people."
-- RUTH HARRISON, author of Animal Machines
"Yet saddest of all fates, surely, is to have lost that sense of the holiness of life altogether; that we commit the blasphemy of bringing thousands of lives to a cruel and terrifying death or of making those lives a living death -- and feel nothing."
-- THE RIGHT REVEREND JOHN AUSTIN BAKER, Bishop of
Salishury, England, commenting on the cruelty of modern animal
agriculture
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
-- RALPH WALDO EMERSON in Fate
FAMILY FARM POLICY
BEYOND BEEF FARM POLICY
By Howard Lyman, Executive
Director Beyond Beef campaign, former
senior lobbyist for the National
Farmers Union; and Mark Ritchie,
Executive Director, Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy
To an intelligent being from anothter planet, U.S. food and agricultural policies and programs would appear deranged. Today, U.S. taxpayers are helping to support an agricultural system that feeds livestock before human beings, devastates peasant farmers, causes food shortages and hunger for millions of people in developing countries. and forces tens of thousands of small American farmers out of business. The current system also promotes the production and consumption of fatty and chemical-laden animal-derived foods that are killing us, and is ruining and poisoning the very soil and water we need to keep our agricultural system running.
Beyond Beef is promoting a fundamental restructuring of U.S. food and agriculture policy in order to reverse these destructive trends. We need to make a transition from feed to food production by rewarding the nation's small farmers with higher prices for growing food for people instead of feed for livestock. Those who wish to continue producing grain-fed beef should have to pay the true market value of the grain.
The world can no longer afford the social and environmental costs of producing grain-fed, or even grass-fed, beef at current levels. Reducing the production and consumption of beef by at least 50 percent will help free agricultural land to grow food for human consumption rather than feed for livestock. Fewer cattle will also lessen the environmental toll on the world's remaining forests and grasslands. Encouraging consumers who continue to consume some beef to demand beef from cattle that are humanely raised under sustainable standards will help encourage a new commercial market for organic beef -- a market niche that can be filled by the family farm.
Only the small family farmer can produce beef and other farm products humanely and sustainably. The Beyond Beef program is working to restore the position of the family farm in American life.
In the United States today, three voracious multi-national corporations hold a near total monopoly on beef production. Their priority is cheap livestock feed. U.S. government policies support these corporations by keeping market prices below the cost of production; American taxpayers are subsidizing the production of beef.
The small family farmer is in a box. He must produce more product at a return below the cost of production in an attempt to spread his fixed cost over more volume. This dilemma makes the family farmer easy prey for the huge agribusiness monopolies that dictate the rules of the game. Unable to get enough income, the family farmer is forced to abandon beef production altogether in favor of maximum yield production of monoculture feed grain. Even then, he's not receiving a high enough price for the feed to cover his costs. Moreover, attempts to increase yields requires the use of more and more chemical fertilizers that, in the end, are self-defeating because they increase costs and lower yields in the long run -- they are also polluting the environment.
Grain sold in the world market for a price that is below the cost of production is also devastating third world farmers. Unlike their American counterparts, however, they are not receiving taxpayer subsidies to supplement their income. They must either stop farming, try to get ajob in the city, or expand agricultural production into environmentally sensitive areas such as the rain forest.
Efforts by progressive farm organizations to establish fair prices for corn, wheat, and other crops have been consistently blocked by the giant agribusiness corporations that feed cattle in huge feedlots. The owners of these "beef factories" want to pay the lowest possible price for feed, and they don't care how many small and mediumsized family farmers go out of business or which rain forest gets destroyed. Their only concern is maximum shortterm profit.
If consumers unite with family farmers to break the monopoly power of agribusiness, it can lead the way to both financial security for family farmers and the elimination of ecologically unsound beef production.
Farmers and consumers also need to work together to defeat new government proposals which would open the U.S. market to greatly expanded amounts of imported beef. Most of this imported beef is produced on rain forest land in Latin America, making it extremely low priced. Not only would the expansion of beef imports accelerate rain forest destruction, it would drive down even further the price paid to family farmers, pushing many tens of thousands out of business and leaving the market solely in the hands of the huge conglomerates.
For the moment, corporate control over the livestock industry means that farmers and consumers will have to establish a number of alternative marketing routes in order to meet the demand for organically raised beef. We need to follow the lead of other countries, where consumer and farmer groups have agreed on specific standards for price, quality, and ecological considerations, and then established a special label for meats complying with these standards.
The Beyond Beef campaign will challenge the unwarranted power amassed by America's agribusiness corporations and the cattle and beef industry giants... and promote a new commercial market for organically raised beef helping to restore a viable market share for the nation's family farmers.
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