Imagine A Vegan World

March 6, 2009   ·   Vegan   ·   1,855 views   ·  

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Let’s imagine if only for a few minutes that everyone on this planet were Vegans, and consumed no animal products. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the typical consumer gets 28% of their calories from mostly meat and dairy products. For countries that are still developing this stat is about 8%, so lets take the average of 15% for the world.

The worlds grain harvest for animal feed is 45% of the entire world and 60% of all grain that is produced in the United States. A study was conducted by Vaclev Smil that concluded that if we take 1kg of vegetable matter to equal 1kg of gross energy consumed, then converting the 1kg consumed product into milk, it would require 4-5kg of vegetable matter, pork, 5-7kg vegetable matter, chicken, 7-10kg of vegetable matter, and beef, 20-25kg of vegetable matter.

Simply moving from beef to chicken would provide a 65% savings in the amount of vegetable matter required to produce the final food product, and even more if we switched from no meat to only dairy. With Beef at25% of global meat, pork at 39%, poultry at 29% we can get an average of 11.2kg of vegetable matter required to produce 1kg of food energy for the whole world.

Based upon the UN studies this means that the global average of 15% calories from animals requires twice as much vegetable matter as the 85% of non-animal calories consumed worldwide. Therefore if we all went vegan we would only need one third of the cropland that we use now.

These are amazing numbers, and are almost unbelievable, but if you crunch the numbers that is what you get. What you also get is this:

At this time 80 tons of nitrogen fertilizer is produced worldwide every year. Since nitrogen fertilizer production produces nitrous oxide, which has a global warming potential of 300 times that of carbon dioxide, the emissions from nitrogen fertilizer equals out to 1376m tons C02 equivalent. In simpler terms by reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer by 2/3 we would offset over 3% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans every year.

Carbon dioxide produced from food transportation just in the UK was 19 million tons in 2002. Calculating the amount of C02 generated by animal feed transportation is very difficult because of the complexity of the supply chain. However if we take into consideration the global nature of the animal feed market, the raw materials are unlikely to have been produced locally than the average UK apple. So being conservative we can assume that total food transportation, humans and animals produces 600m tons, and the whole world combined more around the 1000m tons, or 4% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

Deforestation

Is another unfortunate side effect of cropland growth, especially when the forest that is being destroyed is among the worlds richest and most vital habitats. These same forests absorb about 8% of the worlds C02 each year. Every year about 20,000 square miles of the Amazon is lost through deforestation, with half of that being used for cattle ranching, not to mention the run off from slurry, pesticides and fertilizer is poisoning oceans and rivers worldwide.

I understand that it is un-realistic to think that global Veganism would ever happen, but the realization that our obsession with animal based protein and fat is making a considerable impact on the global environment.

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