The article in the url link below details the processes associated with industrial meat production. The scale and numbers are staggering. According to the article, global meat consumption has quadrupled in the past 50 years, growing fastest in the developing world, and is expected to double again over the next 50 years. The environmental impact is equally staggering:
“These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world's tropical rain forests.”
The article reports that:
“… an estimated 30 percent of the earth's ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world's greenhouse gases -- more than transportation.”
With rising demand comes rising prices, which are projected to have further social consequences as agricultural land is increasingly dedicated to producing cattle feed, rather than other, more calorie efficient, crops. The enormity of the environmental, health, and social consequences of producing and consuming beef on such a scale (presented in great detail in the article), however, make it clear that basic transparency and accountability are yet to make it to this subsection of the agribusiness industry:
“If price spikes don't change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.”
Take care
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
By MARK BITTMAN
2231 words
27 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html
