collapse and the share price to drop and then step in with a buy out. This is how global capitalism works, like a bunch of kids dashing towards a cliff edge in a global game of chicken.
Intensive livestock farming accounts for perhaps 40 per cent of their income. Only by dosing billions of animals with a cocktail of drugs, antibiotics, growth enhancers and pesticides can the barbaric systems work. This has created a separate problem of antibiotics resistance and superbugs (see pages 43-46).
To produce sufficient fodder to feed this mass of animals, yet more intensive agriculture is needed – land pushed beyond its limits with artificial fertilisers, pesticides and hundreds of highly-priced chemicals, many of them carcinogenic.
An equally important profit centre comes from pretending to cure the human diseases caused by eating animals. It is a blinding marketing success – a wonderful, gigantic, circular scam. To destroy this golden goose is to destroy themselves.
They have no intention of doing that and, like the tobacco industry, their profitability is dependent upon expanding their trade into the developing world. Even with the destruction of forests and other ecosystems, there is not sufficient land to grow the huge volume of fodder needed. The amount of productive land is diminishing through desertification and soil degradation and will diminish further still with flooding resulting from global warming.
The driving need, therefore, is to make maximum use of existing land by destroying all weeds and wild plants which compete for nutrients and water and to increase crop yields – hence genetic modification. And to take control of agricultural land wherever possible. Invariably, it will be the poorest whose land is expropriated and Brazil is a good example of what is happening. It is a country riven with landlessness and hunger yet one crop accounts for 25 per cent of its agriculture – soya beans for animal feed.
this is not a battle of equals and unless it is won by David, Goliath is likely to destroy the global environment and possibly us with it
All across the world, peasants are being pushed off the best land to eke out an existence on the margins, where their animals destroy the fragile environment. They then move on and cause more destruction.
The WHO report also addressed this and made an impassioned call for an end to the dominance of meat. “Policies should be geared to promoting the growing of plant foods and to limiting the promotion of meat and dairy.” It was, it said, cheaper, healthier, more efficient and the only way to feed the world.
So far almost no one has listened to them. 55
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