FEEDING THE 9 BILLION
On the 30th October Pig Idea I spoke at the Royal Geographical Society's 21st Century Challenge event on Feeding the 9 Billion.
Joining me on the stage was the evening's chair Jay Rayner, entomologist Peter Smithers, and Professor Tim Wheeler.
With a growing world population, slowly accompanied by a increased hunger for meat and dairy products I spoke about the global need to address the way in which we feed animals in order to tackle the social and environmental impacts this industry has on our planet.
My penultimate slide dubbed You Are What Your Meat Eats called for people to begin to think critically about what goes on beyond the shop floor that provides us with neatly packed meat products. Increased public concern for animal welfare as well reduced meat consumption across the UK (as recently shown by the Eating Better campaign) has recently shown that people are thinking twice about eating meat that has been reared unsustainably. However, as I suggested during the evening, we need to understand that the impacts of livestock farming do not simply stop at the farm gate.
The current practise of importing conventional feed products from environmentally vulnerable regions of the world is not only resulting in deforestation, biodiversity loss, and increased green house gas emissions - it is also using food that could be used to feed the world's current 852 million people living with hunger.
In fact, the UN estimates that the current amount of food that is grown simply to be fed to animals is enough to feed 3 billion people - more than the additional 2 billion people we expect to be sharing our planet with by 2050.
The facts are simple. We currently feed 37% of the global harvest to animals, who in return give us 11% of this back in meat, dairy and egg products. This signifies a loss of over a quarter of the potential energy available at the point of harvest. However, what this does not represent is the expensive resource usage that has gone into growing these crops. Land, water, agrochemicals, and oil have all be used to grow these crops in order to fatten our animals. These things aren't cheap, and in an era where waste is of paramount importance we need to start thinking not just in food miles that describe the 'farm to fork' narrative, but also in the resources and transportation required by each and every input used to grow those crops, in order to grow those animals, in order to feed our growing demand for meat.
Enough ranting. The Pig Idea has a solution: with 15 million tonnes of food going to waste every year in the UK alone, why are we not feeding this to pigs? This virtuous cycle of food-pig-pork-food has been going on since humans domesticated pigs thousands of years ago. In fact, as I show in the video above, it was actually a fineable offence during both World Wars to feed anything other than food waste to livestock.
I might be a vegan, but in a world with a growing population ever-hungry for meat I don't believe its enough to simply say stop eating meat. Of course it's one thing to reduce your meat consumption, but the rest of the meat you consume must come from farms that have reared their animals in a sustainable way and with the highest of animal welfare standards.
Alongside the work of many campaigns that are highlighting the negative impacts of high meat diets to the planet and our own health, The Pig Idea aims to change the way in which we feed livestock in order to minimise the environmental, social, and economic impacts of our current industrial meat-grain complex.
For us to do that we need public support. So come to The Pig Idea Feast on the 21st November in Trafalgar Square and sign the pledge at www.thepigidea.org
- Edd Colbert
Feel free to share this video as its under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license from The Royal Geographical Society.