Vegan for the people

Every minute 11 people die of hunger.

A plant based diet would easily resolve world hunger, which is a distributional problem. Plant based foods have a longer shelf life, are easier to store and require less refrigeration. Therefore they are easier to transport and distribute. Whereas farm animals themselves eat a lot of plant food and they produce only a fraction of animal food for human consumption.

It takes up to 16kg of grains to produce 1kg of meat as well as 15000-20000 liters of water.

The animal industry occupies almost 80% of the global agricultural land but produces less than 20% of the world's calorie supply and less than 40% of the protein supply. This limits the production of crops for human consumption, especially for the world’s poorest people.

Globally, farmland use could be reduced by more than 75%, an area equivalent to the U.S, China, the European Union, and Australia combined, and still feed the entire world if everyone went vegan.

Only a diet that is plant based can feed everyone without destroying the environment. So there are four, partly interconnected arguments that suggest that a society that eats plant-based food would make a significant contribution to eliminate hunger in the world:

• Plant based foods are easier to distribute. The more plant based foods, such as grain, are available to people, the easier it would be to distribute these foods in such a way that world hunger can be eliminated.

• The abolition of animal exploitation leads to a drop in food prices. It is not that there is no more food in the areas affected by world hunger, the people there simply can not afford the prices for it. The increase in prices is due to the demand for grain and soy for livestock feed. The abolition of livestock farming would lead to an enormous increase in the quantities that would then be available exclusively for human demand. Drastic price reductions would also be a positive consequence, making it easier for people on low incomes to buy these resources.

• Plant based diet has been proven to mitigate climate damages and environmental destruction substantially. With the climate change the sea levels will rise further and due to the increasing heat, droughts will make it much harder or even impossible to grow eatable food in dry zones. This will make a lot of land inhabitable and increase population density even further.

• Veganism promotes structures of solidarity in order to reduce the suffering of animals, to protect our environment and also to promote the well-being of people, many people are already eating vegan. The fact that people on our planet go hungry despite the availability of food can only be allowed by a social structure that lacks orientation towards avoiding suffering and compassion. Rethinking and switching to a vegan way of life would promote values of solidarity and compassion and thus create the motivational basis for overcoming world hunger.

75% of emerging infectious diseases in humans originate in animals and are induced by the exploitation of animals for food, clothing, and other purposes. These types of pathogens are zoonotic, meaning that they form in animals and can be transmitted to humans. The majority of diseases that have caused epidemics or pandemics in recent years are zoonotic, including AIDS, Avian flu, Swine flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19.2 In light of this the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) have long predicted that as long as humans continue to rely on animals for food and profit, pandemics are inevitable.

Globally, more antibiotics are prescribed to treat animals on farms than to treat humans. Intensive farms, where thousands of animals are kept together in cramped and often dirty conditions, fed unnatural diets, and subjected to intense stress, are a breeding ground for new bacteria and viruses. Practices such as separating baby animals from their mothers before their immune systems have fully developed make them even more vulnerable to disease. As a result, pigs, chickens, and cows are routinely pumped full of drugs to keep them just healthy enough to survive until they reach “slaughter weight”.

And the antibiotics given to animals on farms are often the same as, or very similar to, those used to fight disease in humans. For example, colistin, a “last resort” antibiotic in human medicine, is frequently used to mass-medicate pigs and poultry.

Because of this, essential drugs are becoming less effective and drug-resistant strains of diseases, such as salmonella and MRSA, are emerging which can be transmitted from animals to humans. For example, one study of UK supermarket pork and chicken found that 51% of samples were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant E coli bacteria.

The antibiotic-resistance crisis is predicted to kill one person every three seconds by 2050. England’s chief medical officer has called it “the greatest future threat to our civilization”. This is a problem we can not afford to ignore!