Showing posts with label animal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animal. Show all posts
Thursday 27 July 2023
Tuesday 21 July 2020
Ideology and the pandemic
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
THE niece was in school in the US when she saw Nadia Comaneci live on TV in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In India, one could only dream of such pleasures although the kindly radio ensured we wouldn’t miss the cricket action at Old Trafford, Karachi or Kanpur thanks to John Arlott, Omar Qureishi and Bobby Talyarkhan weaving magic with the running commentary.
Coming back to Delhi the following year, the niece was greeted with fanfare reserved for people returning from a pilgrimage. She had seen the wondrous Nadia perform her fabled Perfect 10s on the beam and uneven bars. But, uncle, the schoolgirl moved quickly to alert me to a flaw in my eagerness. “Nadia is a communist.” And so? Didn’t we like the Romanian girl’s captivating smile? “Yes, but, you know, communists are trained how to smile.” Probing her reading list in school in America, out came the resolution to the puzzle. George Orwell’s Animal Farm had taken its toll.
The anti-communist primer had come up also for exams at our school in Lucknow, but somehow for most students it was water off a duck’s back. Indeed, the common man’s grip of political reality has remained at variance with, say, Ayub Khan’s, as the dictator turned his hatred of partisans into a bloody mess, or Nehru, who would abandon his fabled democratic instinct to dismiss the world’s first popularly elected Marxist government in Kerala over a disputed school curriculum.
When the Cold War was over, there was a sense of anticipation that the ‘free world’ would tone down the admixture of cretinism and propaganda, which it spewed for decades to describe a communist’s horns and canines. One thought the shrill imagery would give way to a sensible critique of many things that had gone wrong with communist systems.’
Within no time at all, however, the Cold War-era slogan for free democracies turned into an insidious prescription for ‘free-market democracies’. That should have been figured out as early as 1955 when popularly elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in Iran by an American-British intelligence-led coup over the prime minister’s nationalisation of the oil industry.
One of the triggers for Orwell’s outburst against communism was his disenchantment with Stalin, though the British writer never reneged on his own commitment to socialism, provided it remained democratic. Much of Orwell’s anger deepened with his experience of the Spanish Civil War where he saw partisans turning on each other, aligning against Stalinists or supporting them.
As the world continued to see in the fable of Animal Farm the turning of an egalitarian dream into a nightmare, particularly for those that led the allegorical revolution, not much was said or discussed of Orwell’s ‘Man’ who symbolised the animals’ class enemy. It was Man in the form of the drunken farm owner, one Mr Jones and his perpetually snoring wife, whose untold cruelties set off the upheaval.
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” the Old Major confided to the secret barn house meeting. The ageing pig was the intellectual fountainhead of the rebellion. “[Man] does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.”
Replace Man with Capitalism and it reads like a fine précis of the Communist Manifesto. This critique of capitalism in the very beginning of the book has been lobotomised from popular memory. The Covid-19 pandemic may have pushed it back centre stage again, nudging societies to rephrase their worldview. The millions we saw on the roads in the wake of the badly called lockdown in India were as much victims of a callous state as of a reality in which the rich are the privileged and the poor their grovelling minions.
That equation may have been jolted. The world’s four best friends are definitely in trouble. Benjamin Netanyahu has lost his popularity from 70 per cent approval ratings to around 15. The virus has ensnared Jair Bolsonaro in more ways than one. He has a rebellion brewing. Donald Trump is fighting everything and everyone except the virus. His lack of leadership, when it was most needed to save American lives, looks primed to cost him the election in November. Narendra Modi, according to The New York Times, has used the virus-related lockdown to arrest more critics, indicating he is on the back foot.
The Times mentions the case of Natasha Narwal, a student activist accused of rioting by the New Delhi police. When a judge ruled that she be freed for she was merely exercising her right to protest against a divisive citizenship law, the police slapped fresh charges of murder and terrorism, sending her back to jail.
Vijay Prashad’s Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has been studying the way in which governments in places like Laos, Cuba, Venezuela and Vietnam — and one Indian state, Kerala — have tackled the coronavirus.
Both Laos and Vietnam border China, where the virus was first detected in late December 2019, and both have thriving trade and tourist relations with China. India is separated from China by the high Himalayas, while Brazil and the US have two oceans between themselves and Asia; nonetheless, it is the US, Brazil, and India that have shocking numbers of infections and fatalities. Asks Prashad: “What accounts for the ability of relatively poor countries like Laos and Vietnam to attempt to break the chain of this infection, while richer states — notably the United States of America — have floundered?” Orwell should have been around to figure that out.
THE niece was in school in the US when she saw Nadia Comaneci live on TV in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In India, one could only dream of such pleasures although the kindly radio ensured we wouldn’t miss the cricket action at Old Trafford, Karachi or Kanpur thanks to John Arlott, Omar Qureishi and Bobby Talyarkhan weaving magic with the running commentary.
Coming back to Delhi the following year, the niece was greeted with fanfare reserved for people returning from a pilgrimage. She had seen the wondrous Nadia perform her fabled Perfect 10s on the beam and uneven bars. But, uncle, the schoolgirl moved quickly to alert me to a flaw in my eagerness. “Nadia is a communist.” And so? Didn’t we like the Romanian girl’s captivating smile? “Yes, but, you know, communists are trained how to smile.” Probing her reading list in school in America, out came the resolution to the puzzle. George Orwell’s Animal Farm had taken its toll.
The anti-communist primer had come up also for exams at our school in Lucknow, but somehow for most students it was water off a duck’s back. Indeed, the common man’s grip of political reality has remained at variance with, say, Ayub Khan’s, as the dictator turned his hatred of partisans into a bloody mess, or Nehru, who would abandon his fabled democratic instinct to dismiss the world’s first popularly elected Marxist government in Kerala over a disputed school curriculum.
When the Cold War was over, there was a sense of anticipation that the ‘free world’ would tone down the admixture of cretinism and propaganda, which it spewed for decades to describe a communist’s horns and canines. One thought the shrill imagery would give way to a sensible critique of many things that had gone wrong with communist systems.’
Within no time at all, however, the Cold War-era slogan for free democracies turned into an insidious prescription for ‘free-market democracies’. That should have been figured out as early as 1955 when popularly elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in Iran by an American-British intelligence-led coup over the prime minister’s nationalisation of the oil industry.
One of the triggers for Orwell’s outburst against communism was his disenchantment with Stalin, though the British writer never reneged on his own commitment to socialism, provided it remained democratic. Much of Orwell’s anger deepened with his experience of the Spanish Civil War where he saw partisans turning on each other, aligning against Stalinists or supporting them.
As the world continued to see in the fable of Animal Farm the turning of an egalitarian dream into a nightmare, particularly for those that led the allegorical revolution, not much was said or discussed of Orwell’s ‘Man’ who symbolised the animals’ class enemy. It was Man in the form of the drunken farm owner, one Mr Jones and his perpetually snoring wife, whose untold cruelties set off the upheaval.
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” the Old Major confided to the secret barn house meeting. The ageing pig was the intellectual fountainhead of the rebellion. “[Man] does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.”
Replace Man with Capitalism and it reads like a fine précis of the Communist Manifesto. This critique of capitalism in the very beginning of the book has been lobotomised from popular memory. The Covid-19 pandemic may have pushed it back centre stage again, nudging societies to rephrase their worldview. The millions we saw on the roads in the wake of the badly called lockdown in India were as much victims of a callous state as of a reality in which the rich are the privileged and the poor their grovelling minions.
That equation may have been jolted. The world’s four best friends are definitely in trouble. Benjamin Netanyahu has lost his popularity from 70 per cent approval ratings to around 15. The virus has ensnared Jair Bolsonaro in more ways than one. He has a rebellion brewing. Donald Trump is fighting everything and everyone except the virus. His lack of leadership, when it was most needed to save American lives, looks primed to cost him the election in November. Narendra Modi, according to The New York Times, has used the virus-related lockdown to arrest more critics, indicating he is on the back foot.
The Times mentions the case of Natasha Narwal, a student activist accused of rioting by the New Delhi police. When a judge ruled that she be freed for she was merely exercising her right to protest against a divisive citizenship law, the police slapped fresh charges of murder and terrorism, sending her back to jail.
Vijay Prashad’s Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has been studying the way in which governments in places like Laos, Cuba, Venezuela and Vietnam — and one Indian state, Kerala — have tackled the coronavirus.
Both Laos and Vietnam border China, where the virus was first detected in late December 2019, and both have thriving trade and tourist relations with China. India is separated from China by the high Himalayas, while Brazil and the US have two oceans between themselves and Asia; nonetheless, it is the US, Brazil, and India that have shocking numbers of infections and fatalities. Asks Prashad: “What accounts for the ability of relatively poor countries like Laos and Vietnam to attempt to break the chain of this infection, while richer states — notably the United States of America — have floundered?” Orwell should have been around to figure that out.
Friday 19 June 2020
Why you should go animal-free: 18 arguments for eating meat debunked
Unpalatable as it may be for those wedded to producing and eating meat, the environmental and health evidence for a plant-based diet is clear writes Damian Carrington in The Guardian
Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products.
Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?
The coronavirus pandemic has added another ingredient to that mix. The rampant destruction of the natural world is seen as the root cause of diseases leaping into humans and is largely driven by farming expansion. The world’s top biodiversity scientists say even more deadly pandemics will follow unless the ecological devastation is rapidly halted.
Food is also a vital part of our culture, while the affordability of food is an issue of social justice. So there isn’t a single perfect diet. But the evidence is clear: whichever healthy and sustainable diet you choose, it is going to have much less red meat and dairy than today’s standard western diets, and quite possibly none. That’s for two basic reasons.
First, the over-consumption of meat is causing an epidemic of disease, with about $285bn spent every year around the world treating illness caused by eating red meat alone. Second, eating plants is simply a far more efficient use of the planet’s stretched resources than feeding the plants to animals and then eating them. The global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories.
So what about all those arguments in favour of meat-eating and against vegan diets? Let’s start with the big beef about red meat.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Cattle graze in a pasture against a backdrop of wind turbines which are part of the 155 turbine Smoky Hill Wind Farm near Vesper, Kan. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP
Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and ruminants produce a lot of it. But it only remains in the atmosphere for a relatively short time: half is broken down in nine years. This leads some to argue that maintaining the global cattle herd at current levels – about 1 billion animals – is not heating the planet. The burping cows are just replacing the methane that breaks down as time goes by.
But this is simply “creative accounting”, according to Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen and Andrew Balmford at the University of Cambridge. We shouldn’t argue that cattle farmers can continue to pollute just because they have done so in the past, they say: “We need to do more than just stand still.” In fact, the short-lived nature of methane actually makes reducing livestock numbers a “particularly attractive target”, given that we desperately need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
In any case, just focusing on methane doesn’t make the rampant deforestation by cattle ranchers in South America go away. Even if you ignore methane completely, says Poore, animal products still produce more CO2 than plants. Even one proponent of the methane claim says: “I agree that intensive livestock farming is unsustainable.”
Claim: In many places the only thing you can grow is grass for cattle and sheep
NFU president, Minette Batters, says: “Sixty-five percent of British land is only suitable for grazing livestock and we have the right climate to produce high-quality red meat and dairy.”
“But if everybody were to make the argument that ‘our pastures are the best and should be used for grazing’, then there would be no way to limit global warming,” says Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford. His work shows that a transition to a predominantly plant-based flexitarian diet would free up both pasture and cropland.
The pasture could instead be used to grow trees and lock up carbon, provide land for rewilding and the restoration of nature, and growing bio-energy crops to displace fossil fuels. The crops no longer being fed to animals could instead become food for people, increasing a nation’s self-sufficiency in grains.
FacebookTwitterPinterest The Wild Ken Hill project on the Norfolk coast, which is turning around 1,000 acres of marginal farmland and woodland back over to nature. Photograph: Graeme Lyons/Wild Ken Hill/PA
Claim: Grazing cattle help store carbon from the atmosphere in the soil
This is true. The problem is that even in the very best cases, this carbon storage offsets only 20%-60% of the total emissions from grazing cattle. “In other words, grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock,” says Tara Garnett, also at the University of Oxford.
Furthermore, research shows this carbon storage reaches its limit in a few decades, while the problem of methane emissions continue. The stored carbon is also vulnerable - a change in land use or even a drought can see it released again. Proponents of “holistic grazing” to trap carbon are also criticised for unrealistic extrapolation of local results to global levels.
Claim: There is much more wildlife in pasture than in monoculture cropland
That is probably true but misses the real point. A huge driver of the global wildlife crisis is the past and continuing destruction of natural habitat to create pasture for livestock. Herbivores do have an important role in ecosystems, but the high density of farmed herds means pasture is worse for wildlife than natural land. Eating less meat means less destruction of wild places and cutting meat significantly would also free up pasture and cropland that could be returned to nature. Furthermore, a third of all cropland is used to grow animal feed.
Claim: We need animals to convert feed into protein humans can eat
There is no lack of protein, despite the claims. In rich nations, people commonly eat 30-50% more protein than they need. All protein needs can easily be met from plant-based sources, such as beans, lentils, nuts and whole grains.
But animals can play a role in some parts of Africa and Asia where, in India for example, waste from grain production can feed cattle that produce milk. In the rest of the world, where much of cropland that could be used to feed people is actually used to feed animals, a cut in meat eating is still needed for agriculture to be sustainable.
“What about … ?”
Claim: What about soya milk and tofu that is destroying the Amazon?
It’s not. Well over 96% of soy from the Amazon region is fed to cows, pigs and chickens eaten around the world, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Poore. Furthermore, 97% of Brazilian soy is genetically modified, which is banned for human consumption in many countries and is rarely used to make tofu and soya milk in any case.
Soya milk also has much smaller emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. If you are worried about the Amazon, not eating meat remains your best bet.
Claim: Almond milk production is massacring bees and turning land into desert
Some almond production may well cause environmental problems. But that is because rising demand has driven rapid intensification in specific places, like California, which could be addressed with proper regulation. It is nothing to do with what almonds need to grow. Traditional almond production in Southern Europe uses no irrigation at all. It is also perhaps worth noting that the bees that die in California are not wild, but raised by farmers like six-legged livestock.
Like soya milk, almond milk still has lower carbon emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. But if you are still worried, there are plenty of alternatives, with oat milk usually coming out with the lowest environmental footprint.
Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products.
Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?
The coronavirus pandemic has added another ingredient to that mix. The rampant destruction of the natural world is seen as the root cause of diseases leaping into humans and is largely driven by farming expansion. The world’s top biodiversity scientists say even more deadly pandemics will follow unless the ecological devastation is rapidly halted.
Food is also a vital part of our culture, while the affordability of food is an issue of social justice. So there isn’t a single perfect diet. But the evidence is clear: whichever healthy and sustainable diet you choose, it is going to have much less red meat and dairy than today’s standard western diets, and quite possibly none. That’s for two basic reasons.
First, the over-consumption of meat is causing an epidemic of disease, with about $285bn spent every year around the world treating illness caused by eating red meat alone. Second, eating plants is simply a far more efficient use of the planet’s stretched resources than feeding the plants to animals and then eating them. The global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories.
So what about all those arguments in favour of meat-eating and against vegan diets? Let’s start with the big beef about red meat.
Meaty matters
Claim: Grass-fed beef is low carbon
This is true only when compared to intensively-reared beef linked to forest destruction. The UK’s National Farmers Union says UK beef has only half the emissions compared to the world average. But a lot of research shows grass-fed beef uses more land and produces more – or at best similar – emissions because grain is easier for cows to digest and intensively reared cows live shorter lives. Both factors mean less methane. Either way, the emissions from even the best beef are still many times that from beans and pulses.
There’s more. If all the world’s pasture lands were returned to natural vegetation, it would remove greenhouse gases equivalent to about 8 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, according to Joseph Poore at Oxford University. That’s about 15% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Only a small fraction of that pasture land would be needed to grow food crops to replace the lost beef. So overall, if tackling the climate crisis is your thing, then beef is not.
Claim: Cattle are actually neutral for climate, because methane is relatively short-lived greenhouse gas
Claim: Grass-fed beef is low carbon
This is true only when compared to intensively-reared beef linked to forest destruction. The UK’s National Farmers Union says UK beef has only half the emissions compared to the world average. But a lot of research shows grass-fed beef uses more land and produces more – or at best similar – emissions because grain is easier for cows to digest and intensively reared cows live shorter lives. Both factors mean less methane. Either way, the emissions from even the best beef are still many times that from beans and pulses.
There’s more. If all the world’s pasture lands were returned to natural vegetation, it would remove greenhouse gases equivalent to about 8 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, according to Joseph Poore at Oxford University. That’s about 15% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Only a small fraction of that pasture land would be needed to grow food crops to replace the lost beef. So overall, if tackling the climate crisis is your thing, then beef is not.
Claim: Cattle are actually neutral for climate, because methane is relatively short-lived greenhouse gas
FacebookTwitterPinterest Cattle graze in a pasture against a backdrop of wind turbines which are part of the 155 turbine Smoky Hill Wind Farm near Vesper, Kan. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP
Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and ruminants produce a lot of it. But it only remains in the atmosphere for a relatively short time: half is broken down in nine years. This leads some to argue that maintaining the global cattle herd at current levels – about 1 billion animals – is not heating the planet. The burping cows are just replacing the methane that breaks down as time goes by.
But this is simply “creative accounting”, according to Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen and Andrew Balmford at the University of Cambridge. We shouldn’t argue that cattle farmers can continue to pollute just because they have done so in the past, they say: “We need to do more than just stand still.” In fact, the short-lived nature of methane actually makes reducing livestock numbers a “particularly attractive target”, given that we desperately need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
In any case, just focusing on methane doesn’t make the rampant deforestation by cattle ranchers in South America go away. Even if you ignore methane completely, says Poore, animal products still produce more CO2 than plants. Even one proponent of the methane claim says: “I agree that intensive livestock farming is unsustainable.”
Claim: In many places the only thing you can grow is grass for cattle and sheep
NFU president, Minette Batters, says: “Sixty-five percent of British land is only suitable for grazing livestock and we have the right climate to produce high-quality red meat and dairy.”
“But if everybody were to make the argument that ‘our pastures are the best and should be used for grazing’, then there would be no way to limit global warming,” says Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford. His work shows that a transition to a predominantly plant-based flexitarian diet would free up both pasture and cropland.
The pasture could instead be used to grow trees and lock up carbon, provide land for rewilding and the restoration of nature, and growing bio-energy crops to displace fossil fuels. The crops no longer being fed to animals could instead become food for people, increasing a nation’s self-sufficiency in grains.
FacebookTwitterPinterest The Wild Ken Hill project on the Norfolk coast, which is turning around 1,000 acres of marginal farmland and woodland back over to nature. Photograph: Graeme Lyons/Wild Ken Hill/PA
Claim: Grazing cattle help store carbon from the atmosphere in the soil
This is true. The problem is that even in the very best cases, this carbon storage offsets only 20%-60% of the total emissions from grazing cattle. “In other words, grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock,” says Tara Garnett, also at the University of Oxford.
Furthermore, research shows this carbon storage reaches its limit in a few decades, while the problem of methane emissions continue. The stored carbon is also vulnerable - a change in land use or even a drought can see it released again. Proponents of “holistic grazing” to trap carbon are also criticised for unrealistic extrapolation of local results to global levels.
Claim: There is much more wildlife in pasture than in monoculture cropland
That is probably true but misses the real point. A huge driver of the global wildlife crisis is the past and continuing destruction of natural habitat to create pasture for livestock. Herbivores do have an important role in ecosystems, but the high density of farmed herds means pasture is worse for wildlife than natural land. Eating less meat means less destruction of wild places and cutting meat significantly would also free up pasture and cropland that could be returned to nature. Furthermore, a third of all cropland is used to grow animal feed.
Claim: We need animals to convert feed into protein humans can eat
There is no lack of protein, despite the claims. In rich nations, people commonly eat 30-50% more protein than they need. All protein needs can easily be met from plant-based sources, such as beans, lentils, nuts and whole grains.
But animals can play a role in some parts of Africa and Asia where, in India for example, waste from grain production can feed cattle that produce milk. In the rest of the world, where much of cropland that could be used to feed people is actually used to feed animals, a cut in meat eating is still needed for agriculture to be sustainable.
“What about … ?”
Claim: What about soya milk and tofu that is destroying the Amazon?
It’s not. Well over 96% of soy from the Amazon region is fed to cows, pigs and chickens eaten around the world, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Poore. Furthermore, 97% of Brazilian soy is genetically modified, which is banned for human consumption in many countries and is rarely used to make tofu and soya milk in any case.
Soya milk also has much smaller emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. If you are worried about the Amazon, not eating meat remains your best bet.
Claim: Almond milk production is massacring bees and turning land into desert
Some almond production may well cause environmental problems. But that is because rising demand has driven rapid intensification in specific places, like California, which could be addressed with proper regulation. It is nothing to do with what almonds need to grow. Traditional almond production in Southern Europe uses no irrigation at all. It is also perhaps worth noting that the bees that die in California are not wild, but raised by farmers like six-legged livestock.
Like soya milk, almond milk still has lower carbon emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. But if you are still worried, there are plenty of alternatives, with oat milk usually coming out with the lowest environmental footprint.
Claim: Avocados are causing droughts in places
Again, the problem here is the rapid growth of production in specific regions that lack prudent controls on water use, like Peru and Chile. Avocados generate three times less emissions than chicken, four times less than pork, and 20 times less than beef.
If you are still worried about avocados, you can of course choose not to eat them. But it’s not a reason to eat meat instead, which has a much bigger water and deforestation footprint.
The market is likely to solve the problem, as the high demand from consumers for avocados and almonds incentivises farmers elsewhere to grow the crops, thereby alleviating the pressure on current production hotspots.
Claim: Quinoa boom is harming poor farmers in Peru and Bolivia
Quinoa is an amazing food and has seen a boom. But the idea that this took food from the mouths of poor farmers is wrong. “The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it is patently false,” said researchers who studied the issue.
Quinoa was never a staple food, representing just a few percent of the food budget for these people. The quinoa boom has had no effect on their nutrition. The boom also significantly boosted the farmers’ income.
There is an issue with falling soil quality, as the land is worked harder. But quinoa is now planted in China, India and Nepal, as well as in the US and Canada, easing the burden. The researchers are more worried now about the loss of income for South American farmers as the quinoa supply rises and the price falls.
Claim: What about palm oil destroying rainforests and orangutans?
Palm oil plantations have indeed led to terrible deforestation. But that is an issue for everybody, not only vegans: it’s in about half of all products on supermarket shelves, both food and toiletries. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature argues that choosing sustainably produced palm oil is actually positive, because other oil crops take up more land.
But Poore says: “We are abandoning millions of acres a year of oilseed land around the world, including rapeseed and sunflower fields in the former Soviet regions, and traditional olive plantations.” Making better use of this land would be preferable to using palm oil, he says.
Healthy questions
Claim: Vegans don’t get enough B12, making them stupid
A vegan diet is generally very healthy, but doctors have warned about the potential lack of B12, an important vitamin for brain function that is found in meat, eggs and cows’ milk. This is easily remedied by taking a supplement.
However, a closer look reveals some surprises. B12 is made by bacteria in soil and the guts of animals, and free-range livestock ingest the B12 as they graze and peck the ground. But most livestock are not free-range, and pesticides and antibiotics widely used on farms kill the B12-producing bugs. The result is that most B12 supplements - 90% according to one source – are fed to livestock, not people.
So there’s a choice here between taking a B12 supplement yourself, or eating an animal that has been given the supplement. Algae are a plant-based source of B12, although the degree of bio-availability is not settled yet. It is also worth noting that a significant number of non-vegans are B12 deficient, especially older people. Among vegans the figure is only about 10%.
Claim: Plant-based alternatives to meat are really unhealthy
The rapid rise of the plant-based burger has prompted some to criticise them as ultra-processed junk food. A plant-based burger could be unhealthier if the salt levels are very high, says Springmann, but it is most likely to still be healthier than a meat burger when all nutritional factors are considered, particularly fibre. Furthermore, replacing a beef burger with a plant-based alternative is certain to be less damaging to the environment.
There is certainly a strong argument to be made that overall we eat far too much processed food, but that applies just as much to meat eaters as to vegetarians and vegans. And given that most people are unlikely to give up their burgers and sausages any time, the plant-based options are a useful alternative.
‘Catching out’ vegans
Claim: Fruit and vegetables aren’t vegan because they rely on animal manure as fertiliser
Most vegans would say it’s just silly to say fruit and veg are animal products and plenty are produced without animal dung. In any case there is no reason for horticulture to rely on manure at all. Synthetic fertiliser is easily made from the nitrogen in the air and there is plenty of organic fertiliser available if we chose to use it more widely in the form of human faeces. Over application of fertiliser does cause water pollution problems in many parts of the world. But that applies to both synthetic fertiliser and manure and results from bad management.
Claim: Vegan diets kill millions of insects
Piers Morgan is among those railing against “hypocrite” vegans because commercially kept bees die while pollinating almonds and avocados and combine harvesters “create mass murder of bugs” and small mammals while bringing in the grain harvest. But almost everyone eats these foods, not just vegans.
It is true that insects are in a terrible decline across the planet. But the biggest drivers of this are the destruction of wild habitat, largely for meat production, and widespread pesticide use. If it is insects that you are really worried about, then eating a plant-based organic diet is the option to choose.
Claim: Telling people to eat less meat and dairy is denying vital nutrition to the world’s poorest
A “planetary health diet” published by scientists to meet both global health and environmental needs was criticised by journalist Joanna Blythman: “When ideologues living in affluent countries pressurise poor countries to eschew animal foods and go plant-based, they are displaying crass insensitivity, and a colonial White Saviour mindset.”
In fact, says Springmann, who was part of the team behind the planetary health diet, it would improve nutritional intake in all regions, including poorer regions where starchy foods currently dominate diets. The big cuts in meat and dairy are needed in rich nations. In other parts of the world, many healthy, traditional diets are already low in animal products.
On the road
Claim: Transport emissions mean that eating plants from all over the world is much worse than local meat and dairy
“‘Eating local’ is a recommendation you hear often [but] is one of the most misguided pieces of advice,” says Hannah Ritchie, at the University of Oxford. “Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”
Beef and lamb have many times the carbon footprint of most other foods, she says. So whether the meat is produced locally or shipped from the other side of the world, plants will still have much lower carbon footprints. Transport emissions for beef are about 0.5% of the total and for lamb it’s 2%.
The reason for this is that almost all food transported long distances is carried by ships, which can accommodate huge loads and are therefore fairly efficient. For example, the shipping emissions for avocados crossing the Atlantic are about 8% of their total footprint. Air freight does of course result in high emissions, but very little food is transported this way; it accounts for just 0.16% of food miles.
Claim: All the farmers who raise livestock would be unemployed if the world went meat-free
Livestock farming is massively subsidised with taxpayers money around the world – unlike vegetables and fruit. That money could be used to support more sustainable foods such as beans and nuts instead, and to pay for other valuable services, such as capturing carbon in woodlands and wetlands, restoring wildlife, cleaning water and reducing flood risks. Shouldn’t your taxes be used to provide public goods rather than harms?
So, food is complicated. But however much we might wish to continue farming and eating as we do today, the evidence is crystal clear that consuming less meat and more plants is very good for both our health and the planet. The fact that some plant crops have problems is not a reason to eat meat instead.
In the end, you will choose what you eat. If you want to eat healthily and sustainably, you don’t have to stop eating meat and dairy altogether. The planetary health diet allows for a beef burger, some fish and an egg each week, and a glass of milk or some cheese each day.
Food writer Michael Pollan foreshadowed the planetary health diet in 2008 with a simple seven-word rule: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But if you want to have the maximum impact on fighting the climate and wildlife crisis, then it is going to be all plants.
If you are still worried about avocados, you can of course choose not to eat them. But it’s not a reason to eat meat instead, which has a much bigger water and deforestation footprint.
The market is likely to solve the problem, as the high demand from consumers for avocados and almonds incentivises farmers elsewhere to grow the crops, thereby alleviating the pressure on current production hotspots.
Claim: Quinoa boom is harming poor farmers in Peru and Bolivia
Quinoa is an amazing food and has seen a boom. But the idea that this took food from the mouths of poor farmers is wrong. “The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it is patently false,” said researchers who studied the issue.
Quinoa was never a staple food, representing just a few percent of the food budget for these people. The quinoa boom has had no effect on their nutrition. The boom also significantly boosted the farmers’ income.
There is an issue with falling soil quality, as the land is worked harder. But quinoa is now planted in China, India and Nepal, as well as in the US and Canada, easing the burden. The researchers are more worried now about the loss of income for South American farmers as the quinoa supply rises and the price falls.
Claim: What about palm oil destroying rainforests and orangutans?
Palm oil plantations have indeed led to terrible deforestation. But that is an issue for everybody, not only vegans: it’s in about half of all products on supermarket shelves, both food and toiletries. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature argues that choosing sustainably produced palm oil is actually positive, because other oil crops take up more land.
But Poore says: “We are abandoning millions of acres a year of oilseed land around the world, including rapeseed and sunflower fields in the former Soviet regions, and traditional olive plantations.” Making better use of this land would be preferable to using palm oil, he says.
Healthy questions
Claim: Vegans don’t get enough B12, making them stupid
A vegan diet is generally very healthy, but doctors have warned about the potential lack of B12, an important vitamin for brain function that is found in meat, eggs and cows’ milk. This is easily remedied by taking a supplement.
However, a closer look reveals some surprises. B12 is made by bacteria in soil and the guts of animals, and free-range livestock ingest the B12 as they graze and peck the ground. But most livestock are not free-range, and pesticides and antibiotics widely used on farms kill the B12-producing bugs. The result is that most B12 supplements - 90% according to one source – are fed to livestock, not people.
So there’s a choice here between taking a B12 supplement yourself, or eating an animal that has been given the supplement. Algae are a plant-based source of B12, although the degree of bio-availability is not settled yet. It is also worth noting that a significant number of non-vegans are B12 deficient, especially older people. Among vegans the figure is only about 10%.
Claim: Plant-based alternatives to meat are really unhealthy
The rapid rise of the plant-based burger has prompted some to criticise them as ultra-processed junk food. A plant-based burger could be unhealthier if the salt levels are very high, says Springmann, but it is most likely to still be healthier than a meat burger when all nutritional factors are considered, particularly fibre. Furthermore, replacing a beef burger with a plant-based alternative is certain to be less damaging to the environment.
There is certainly a strong argument to be made that overall we eat far too much processed food, but that applies just as much to meat eaters as to vegetarians and vegans. And given that most people are unlikely to give up their burgers and sausages any time, the plant-based options are a useful alternative.
‘Catching out’ vegans
Claim: Fruit and vegetables aren’t vegan because they rely on animal manure as fertiliser
Most vegans would say it’s just silly to say fruit and veg are animal products and plenty are produced without animal dung. In any case there is no reason for horticulture to rely on manure at all. Synthetic fertiliser is easily made from the nitrogen in the air and there is plenty of organic fertiliser available if we chose to use it more widely in the form of human faeces. Over application of fertiliser does cause water pollution problems in many parts of the world. But that applies to both synthetic fertiliser and manure and results from bad management.
Claim: Vegan diets kill millions of insects
Piers Morgan is among those railing against “hypocrite” vegans because commercially kept bees die while pollinating almonds and avocados and combine harvesters “create mass murder of bugs” and small mammals while bringing in the grain harvest. But almost everyone eats these foods, not just vegans.
It is true that insects are in a terrible decline across the planet. But the biggest drivers of this are the destruction of wild habitat, largely for meat production, and widespread pesticide use. If it is insects that you are really worried about, then eating a plant-based organic diet is the option to choose.
Claim: Telling people to eat less meat and dairy is denying vital nutrition to the world’s poorest
A “planetary health diet” published by scientists to meet both global health and environmental needs was criticised by journalist Joanna Blythman: “When ideologues living in affluent countries pressurise poor countries to eschew animal foods and go plant-based, they are displaying crass insensitivity, and a colonial White Saviour mindset.”
In fact, says Springmann, who was part of the team behind the planetary health diet, it would improve nutritional intake in all regions, including poorer regions where starchy foods currently dominate diets. The big cuts in meat and dairy are needed in rich nations. In other parts of the world, many healthy, traditional diets are already low in animal products.
On the road
Claim: Transport emissions mean that eating plants from all over the world is much worse than local meat and dairy
“‘Eating local’ is a recommendation you hear often [but] is one of the most misguided pieces of advice,” says Hannah Ritchie, at the University of Oxford. “Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”
Beef and lamb have many times the carbon footprint of most other foods, she says. So whether the meat is produced locally or shipped from the other side of the world, plants will still have much lower carbon footprints. Transport emissions for beef are about 0.5% of the total and for lamb it’s 2%.
The reason for this is that almost all food transported long distances is carried by ships, which can accommodate huge loads and are therefore fairly efficient. For example, the shipping emissions for avocados crossing the Atlantic are about 8% of their total footprint. Air freight does of course result in high emissions, but very little food is transported this way; it accounts for just 0.16% of food miles.
Claim: All the farmers who raise livestock would be unemployed if the world went meat-free
Livestock farming is massively subsidised with taxpayers money around the world – unlike vegetables and fruit. That money could be used to support more sustainable foods such as beans and nuts instead, and to pay for other valuable services, such as capturing carbon in woodlands and wetlands, restoring wildlife, cleaning water and reducing flood risks. Shouldn’t your taxes be used to provide public goods rather than harms?
So, food is complicated. But however much we might wish to continue farming and eating as we do today, the evidence is crystal clear that consuming less meat and more plants is very good for both our health and the planet. The fact that some plant crops have problems is not a reason to eat meat instead.
In the end, you will choose what you eat. If you want to eat healthily and sustainably, you don’t have to stop eating meat and dairy altogether. The planetary health diet allows for a beef burger, some fish and an egg each week, and a glass of milk or some cheese each day.
Food writer Michael Pollan foreshadowed the planetary health diet in 2008 with a simple seven-word rule: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But if you want to have the maximum impact on fighting the climate and wildlife crisis, then it is going to be all plants.
Wednesday 10 August 2016
I’ve converted to veganism to reduce my impacts on the living world
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Nothing hits the planet as hard as rearing animals. Caring for it means cutting out meat, dairy and eggs.
Farms and pastureland carve their way into tropical forestland in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, one of the Amazon’s most deforested regions. Photograph: Planet
I published the photos I had taken in the Guardian, and they caused a stir. Yet the Environment Agency still refused to take action. Its excuses were so preposterous that I realised this was more than simple incompetence. After publishing another article about this farce, I was contacted separately by two staff members at the agency. They told me they had been instructed to disregard all incidents of this kind. The cause, they believed, was political pressure from the government.
That did it. Why, I reasoned, should I support an industry the government refuses to regulate? Since then, I have cut almost all animal products from my diet. I’m not religious about it. If I’m at a friend’s house I might revert to vegetarianism. If I’m away from home, I will take a drop of milk in my tea. About once a fortnight I have an egg for my breakfast, perhaps once a month a fish I catch, or a herring or some anchovies (if you eat fish, take them from the bottom of the food chain). Perhaps three or four times a year, on special occasions, I will eat farmed meat: partly out of greed, partly because I don’t want to be even more of a spectre at the feast than I am already. This slight adaptation, I feel, also reduces the chances of a relapse.
I still eat roadkill when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.
Even so, such meals are rare. My rough calculation suggests that 97% of my diet now consists of plants. I eat plenty of pulses, seeds and nuts and heaps of vegetables. That almost allows me to join the 500,000 people in Britain who are full vegans – but not quite. Of course, these choices also have impacts, but they are generally far lower than those of meat, dairy and eggs. Paradoxically, if you want to eat less soya, eat soya directly: eating animal products tends to mean consuming far more of this crop, albeit indirectly. Almost all the soya grown where rainforests once stood is used to feed animals. Replacing meat with soya reduces the clearance of natural vegetation, per kilogram of protein, by 96%.
After almost a year on this diet, I have dropped from 12 stone to 11. I feel better than I’ve done for years, and my craving for fat has all but disappeared. Cheese is no more appealing to me now than a lump of lard. My asthma has almost gone. There are a number of possible explanations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with cutting out milk. I have to think harder about what I cook, but that is no bad thing.
Meat eating is strongly associated with conventional images of masculinity, and some people appear to feel threatened by those who give up animal products. An Italian politician this week proposed jailing parents who impose a vegan diet on their children, in case it leaves them malnourished. Curiously, he failed to recommend the same sanction for rearing them on chips and sausages.
By chance, at a festival this summer, I again met the man from Devon who had tried to persuade the Environment Agency to take action on the River Culm. He told me that nothing has changed. When there’s a choice between protecting the living world and appeasing powerful lobby groups, most governments will take the second option. But we can withdraw our consent from this corruption. If you exercise that choice, I doubt you will regret it.
Nothing hits the planet as hard as rearing animals. Caring for it means cutting out meat, dairy and eggs.
Illustration by Nate Kitch
The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify our presence on the planet. It is the amount of land an animal-based diet needs that makes it so destructive.
An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves, rather than feed them to cows and chickens.
This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming in Britain to be set aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200 million people. Extending this thought experiment to the rest of the world, it’s not hard to see how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live alongside us, but not alongside our current diet.
Because we have failed to understand this in terms of space, we believe we can solve the ethical problems caused by eating animals by switching from indoor production to free-range meat and eggs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free-range farming is kinder to livestock but crueller to the rest of the living world.
When people criticise farming, they usually preface it with the word intensive. But extensive farming, almost by definition, does greater harm to the planet: more land is needed to rear the same amount of food. Keeping cattle or sheep on ranches, whether in the Amazon, the US, Australia or the hills of Britain, is even more of a planet-busting indulgence than beef feed-lots and hog cities, cruel and hideous as these are.
Over several years, as I became more aware of these inconvenient truths, I gradually dropped farmed meat from my diet. But I still consumed milk and eggs. I knew the dire environmental impacts of the crops(such as maize and soya) that dairy cows and chickens are fed. I knew about the waste, the climate change, the air pollution. But greed got the better of me. Cheese, yoghurt, butter, eggs – I loved them all.
Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its wildlife and beauty. However, the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for some sewage fungus. I traced the pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency (the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.
The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify our presence on the planet. It is the amount of land an animal-based diet needs that makes it so destructive.
An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves, rather than feed them to cows and chickens.
This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming in Britain to be set aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200 million people. Extending this thought experiment to the rest of the world, it’s not hard to see how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live alongside us, but not alongside our current diet.
Because we have failed to understand this in terms of space, we believe we can solve the ethical problems caused by eating animals by switching from indoor production to free-range meat and eggs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free-range farming is kinder to livestock but crueller to the rest of the living world.
When people criticise farming, they usually preface it with the word intensive. But extensive farming, almost by definition, does greater harm to the planet: more land is needed to rear the same amount of food. Keeping cattle or sheep on ranches, whether in the Amazon, the US, Australia or the hills of Britain, is even more of a planet-busting indulgence than beef feed-lots and hog cities, cruel and hideous as these are.
Over several years, as I became more aware of these inconvenient truths, I gradually dropped farmed meat from my diet. But I still consumed milk and eggs. I knew the dire environmental impacts of the crops(such as maize and soya) that dairy cows and chickens are fed. I knew about the waste, the climate change, the air pollution. But greed got the better of me. Cheese, yoghurt, butter, eggs – I loved them all.
Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its wildlife and beauty. However, the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for some sewage fungus. I traced the pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency (the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.
Farms and pastureland carve their way into tropical forestland in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, one of the Amazon’s most deforested regions. Photograph: Planet
I published the photos I had taken in the Guardian, and they caused a stir. Yet the Environment Agency still refused to take action. Its excuses were so preposterous that I realised this was more than simple incompetence. After publishing another article about this farce, I was contacted separately by two staff members at the agency. They told me they had been instructed to disregard all incidents of this kind. The cause, they believed, was political pressure from the government.
That did it. Why, I reasoned, should I support an industry the government refuses to regulate? Since then, I have cut almost all animal products from my diet. I’m not religious about it. If I’m at a friend’s house I might revert to vegetarianism. If I’m away from home, I will take a drop of milk in my tea. About once a fortnight I have an egg for my breakfast, perhaps once a month a fish I catch, or a herring or some anchovies (if you eat fish, take them from the bottom of the food chain). Perhaps three or four times a year, on special occasions, I will eat farmed meat: partly out of greed, partly because I don’t want to be even more of a spectre at the feast than I am already. This slight adaptation, I feel, also reduces the chances of a relapse.
I still eat roadkill when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.
Even so, such meals are rare. My rough calculation suggests that 97% of my diet now consists of plants. I eat plenty of pulses, seeds and nuts and heaps of vegetables. That almost allows me to join the 500,000 people in Britain who are full vegans – but not quite. Of course, these choices also have impacts, but they are generally far lower than those of meat, dairy and eggs. Paradoxically, if you want to eat less soya, eat soya directly: eating animal products tends to mean consuming far more of this crop, albeit indirectly. Almost all the soya grown where rainforests once stood is used to feed animals. Replacing meat with soya reduces the clearance of natural vegetation, per kilogram of protein, by 96%.
After almost a year on this diet, I have dropped from 12 stone to 11. I feel better than I’ve done for years, and my craving for fat has all but disappeared. Cheese is no more appealing to me now than a lump of lard. My asthma has almost gone. There are a number of possible explanations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with cutting out milk. I have to think harder about what I cook, but that is no bad thing.
Meat eating is strongly associated with conventional images of masculinity, and some people appear to feel threatened by those who give up animal products. An Italian politician this week proposed jailing parents who impose a vegan diet on their children, in case it leaves them malnourished. Curiously, he failed to recommend the same sanction for rearing them on chips and sausages.
By chance, at a festival this summer, I again met the man from Devon who had tried to persuade the Environment Agency to take action on the River Culm. He told me that nothing has changed. When there’s a choice between protecting the living world and appeasing powerful lobby groups, most governments will take the second option. But we can withdraw our consent from this corruption. If you exercise that choice, I doubt you will regret it.
Monday 2 May 2016
Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?
Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian
‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP
The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.
Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.
But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.
As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.
The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.
Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.
But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.
As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.
Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.
But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.
Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.
Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.
In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.
Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.
To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”
Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?
If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.
Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”
The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.
Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.
Tuesday 24 November 2015
There’s a population crisis all right. But probably not the one you think
While all eyes are on human numbers, it’s the rise in farm animals that is laying the planet waste
A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population does. The dairy farms in Tulare County, California, produce five times as much as New York City.
Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England the system designed to protect us from the tide of slurry has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.
Livestock farming creates around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.
So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity?
‘By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals.’ Illustration by Nate Kitch
GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian
This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.
You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means that they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.
At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62 million. But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations that they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.
At their worst, population campaigners seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.
Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If 2 billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.
If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it is consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.
So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals.
Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land.A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. And now the grain that farm animals consume is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.
This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.
GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian
This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.
You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means that they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.
At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62 million. But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations that they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.
At their worst, population campaigners seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.
Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If 2 billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.
If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it is consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.
So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals.
Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land.A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. And now the grain that farm animals consume is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.
This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.
A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population does. The dairy farms in Tulare County, California, produce five times as much as New York City.
Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England the system designed to protect us from the tide of slurry has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.
Livestock farming creates around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.
So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity?
A factory farm in Missouri, USA. ‘Why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room?’ Photograph: Daniel Pepper/Getty Images
A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change diets once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.
It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.
But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.
A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change diets once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.
It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.
But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.
Tuesday 20 October 2015
The wild animal of batting
Jarrod Kimber in Cricinfo
There are batsmen you can explain, whose magic you can unravel. Virender Sehwag was not one of them
Sehwag: an experience that grabs you © Getty Images
There is a flash. It's up and over a bunch of slips, maybe a gully, and a third man. The ball just disappears up, out of sight, before dropping over the rope. The third man is puffing hard, but this wasn't for him. There is a frustrated, faceless bowler, an unspecified ground and a generic captain rubbing his forehead.
As it happens you can hear whispers of the batsman being compared to Sachin. But that is unfair. This is something different.
There are some things that shouldn't be explained. Maybe that's why we don't get Victor Trumper. We search for answers, facts, numbers and reasons. For some people that doen't work; you have to see them, feel them. They are part of a time and place you don't get. You are not meant to understand what they stood for, just know that it was something special through all the witnesses.
Yet, even when you weren't there, you had no context, no visuals, no memories, no experience; he could still move you. Sometimes it was the actual numbers alone. Just starting at a scorecard, there was an experience of him that just grabs you. The man who wore no number, could with a simple 200 out of 330, give you a sudden rush of blood, that slight, magical dizzy feel of something you can't quite explain.
There are some who say he only makes runs on Asian flat tracks. It feels like abusing a painter for preferring to use canvas instead of wanting to paint a live shark. What he created with the flat tracks was unlike what anyone else would, or could. There were times when he scored that it felt like Asia had been created just so he would have this stage.
There is a flash over the leg side. It's a drop-kick, a pick-up, a smack. The bowler is just an extra, a vessel. The ball goes over a rope, a fence, some spectators, a hill. It hits a scoreboard. Maybe it goes over it. Maybe it disappears into the distance. Maybe it explodes the scoreboard like you see in them Hollywood baseball films. The whole thing happened like it was preordained, like it was supposed to happen that way, and that time, for some secret reason.
He just stands there. Looking generally disinterested. People around the world are yelling, jumping, screaming, laughing. Mouths are wide open, jaws are on the floor. But he doesn't react that way. He almost never does.
There is a flash outside off. The bat has missed the ball. Yet the same general look of disinterest and calmness he has after a boundary follows a play and miss. Other days he uses the same smile after his best shot, or his worst.
Playing and missing is supposed to be a test of who you are as a human being. Do you believe in luck, do you believe in hard work, do you believe in faith? In his case, none of these applied. As to whether the ball went into a scoreboard, into a crowd, onto a roof, or safely nestled in the keeper's gloves, it was gone. Finished. That moment, that euphoria, that danger, doesn't matter anymore. The greatest legcutter, the sexiest doosra, or a mystery ball fired from a cannon, it doesn't matter. It could be a long hop. A full toss. It just goes past him. When you bowled to him, you weren't bowling to a batsman; you were bowling to a belief system.
There was comfort in his madness. Others have stopped, slowed, changed, restricted, just to survive, to thrive, to score all that they could score. Not him. Maybe he just couldn't slow down, couldn't hold back. He was what he was, a wild animal of batting.
There is a flash through point. It seems to exist on his bat and at the boundary at the same time. It was a cut but could have been a drive. They all went the same way, just as fast. Before the commentator has had time to react, the bowler has placed his hands on his head or the crowd is fully out of their chairs, the ball's journey has been completed.
Maybe it's Chennai. Maybe it's Melbourne. Maybe it's Lahore. Maybe it's Galle. Maybe It's Steyn. Maybe it's Ahktar. Maybe it's McGrath. Maybe it's Murali. It's all too quick. He's already moved on.
There are people who say he is just a slogger. That's a misunderstanding of slogging. Sloggers throw the bat recklessly without a method or a base. They always run out of luck, out of time, are found out. This was Zen slogging. He has a slogger's energy, a batsman's eye, and a tranquil mind. It's an odd combination. It shouldn't work. It didn't always.
But when it did, the innings was something that changed things. He could, when applied correctly, change the future. At other times, it was as if he could predict it. And if he didn't change the future of batting, he, at the very least, foretold it.
There are batsmen you can explain. You can unravel their magic; paint it for others to see. But he was above explanation. You couldn't unravel what he did, you simply had to reclassify it. His batting wasn't from the manual. It wasn't like the others.
If anything, it was a self-help manual, a religious text, wrapped up in cover drives. A road map for better living was right there in the middle of the ground. Play your shots, forget your mistakes, forget your success, keep playing your shots. Believe. Sehwagology.
There is a flash back past the bowler. There is someone, somewhere, stating that it is impossible to play that shot, from that ball. Someone else, somewhere else, is comparing him to another batsman. There is another someone, somewhere online, typing out their theory on his flaws. But at the ground their words get drowned out in applause - not applause, a cacophony of screaming.
There is a flash. A sudden burst of bright light. A brief display of joy. A moment. An instant. Virender Sehwag.
There are batsmen you can explain, whose magic you can unravel. Virender Sehwag was not one of them
Sehwag: an experience that grabs you © Getty ImagesThere is a flash. It's up and over a bunch of slips, maybe a gully, and a third man. The ball just disappears up, out of sight, before dropping over the rope. The third man is puffing hard, but this wasn't for him. There is a frustrated, faceless bowler, an unspecified ground and a generic captain rubbing his forehead.
As it happens you can hear whispers of the batsman being compared to Sachin. But that is unfair. This is something different.
There are some things that shouldn't be explained. Maybe that's why we don't get Victor Trumper. We search for answers, facts, numbers and reasons. For some people that doen't work; you have to see them, feel them. They are part of a time and place you don't get. You are not meant to understand what they stood for, just know that it was something special through all the witnesses.
Yet, even when you weren't there, you had no context, no visuals, no memories, no experience; he could still move you. Sometimes it was the actual numbers alone. Just starting at a scorecard, there was an experience of him that just grabs you. The man who wore no number, could with a simple 200 out of 330, give you a sudden rush of blood, that slight, magical dizzy feel of something you can't quite explain.
There are some who say he only makes runs on Asian flat tracks. It feels like abusing a painter for preferring to use canvas instead of wanting to paint a live shark. What he created with the flat tracks was unlike what anyone else would, or could. There were times when he scored that it felt like Asia had been created just so he would have this stage.
There is a flash over the leg side. It's a drop-kick, a pick-up, a smack. The bowler is just an extra, a vessel. The ball goes over a rope, a fence, some spectators, a hill. It hits a scoreboard. Maybe it goes over it. Maybe it disappears into the distance. Maybe it explodes the scoreboard like you see in them Hollywood baseball films. The whole thing happened like it was preordained, like it was supposed to happen that way, and that time, for some secret reason.
He just stands there. Looking generally disinterested. People around the world are yelling, jumping, screaming, laughing. Mouths are wide open, jaws are on the floor. But he doesn't react that way. He almost never does.
There is a flash outside off. The bat has missed the ball. Yet the same general look of disinterest and calmness he has after a boundary follows a play and miss. Other days he uses the same smile after his best shot, or his worst.
Playing and missing is supposed to be a test of who you are as a human being. Do you believe in luck, do you believe in hard work, do you believe in faith? In his case, none of these applied. As to whether the ball went into a scoreboard, into a crowd, onto a roof, or safely nestled in the keeper's gloves, it was gone. Finished. That moment, that euphoria, that danger, doesn't matter anymore. The greatest legcutter, the sexiest doosra, or a mystery ball fired from a cannon, it doesn't matter. It could be a long hop. A full toss. It just goes past him. When you bowled to him, you weren't bowling to a batsman; you were bowling to a belief system.
There was comfort in his madness. Others have stopped, slowed, changed, restricted, just to survive, to thrive, to score all that they could score. Not him. Maybe he just couldn't slow down, couldn't hold back. He was what he was, a wild animal of batting.
There is a flash through point. It seems to exist on his bat and at the boundary at the same time. It was a cut but could have been a drive. They all went the same way, just as fast. Before the commentator has had time to react, the bowler has placed his hands on his head or the crowd is fully out of their chairs, the ball's journey has been completed.
Maybe it's Chennai. Maybe it's Melbourne. Maybe it's Lahore. Maybe it's Galle. Maybe It's Steyn. Maybe it's Ahktar. Maybe it's McGrath. Maybe it's Murali. It's all too quick. He's already moved on.
There are people who say he is just a slogger. That's a misunderstanding of slogging. Sloggers throw the bat recklessly without a method or a base. They always run out of luck, out of time, are found out. This was Zen slogging. He has a slogger's energy, a batsman's eye, and a tranquil mind. It's an odd combination. It shouldn't work. It didn't always.
But when it did, the innings was something that changed things. He could, when applied correctly, change the future. At other times, it was as if he could predict it. And if he didn't change the future of batting, he, at the very least, foretold it.
There are batsmen you can explain. You can unravel their magic; paint it for others to see. But he was above explanation. You couldn't unravel what he did, you simply had to reclassify it. His batting wasn't from the manual. It wasn't like the others.
If anything, it was a self-help manual, a religious text, wrapped up in cover drives. A road map for better living was right there in the middle of the ground. Play your shots, forget your mistakes, forget your success, keep playing your shots. Believe. Sehwagology.
There is a flash back past the bowler. There is someone, somewhere, stating that it is impossible to play that shot, from that ball. Someone else, somewhere else, is comparing him to another batsman. There is another someone, somewhere online, typing out their theory on his flaws. But at the ground their words get drowned out in applause - not applause, a cacophony of screaming.
There is a flash. A sudden burst of bright light. A brief display of joy. A moment. An instant. Virender Sehwag.
Wednesday 19 June 2013
Dog meat festival at Yulin, Guangxi
People of Yulin, Guangxi province, cherish summer solstice tradition but animal rights groups denounce event as inhumane
Chinese volunteers rescue dogs destined for dog-meat restaurants. In China, dog meat is prized as a nutritious wintertime dish. Photograph: Quirky China News/Rex Features
Residents of a small city in southern China plan to hold an annual dog-meat festival on Friday amid intense criticism from animal rights groups, which have denounced the one-day event as unsafe and inhumane.
Residents of Yulin in Guangxi province consider the festival an ancient summer solstice tradition. Many cherish their city's dog-meat culture, which involves the mass consumption of dog-meat hotpot served with lychees and strong grain liquor.
Animal rights groups say 10,000 dogs are slaughtered during the festival each year, and that many are electrocuted, burned and skinned alive. Pictures posted online show flayed dogs, dogs hanging from meat hooks, and piles of dog corpses on the side of the road. In China dog meat is prized as a nutritious wintertime dish that doctors can prescribe to treat maladies such as impotence and poor circulation.
Dog meat being prepared for sale in Yulin, Guangxi province. Photograph: Quirky China News/Rex Features
Activists have tried to block the event on numerous occasions through open letters and street protests. Some have implored the UK and US governments to interfere with the festival via online petitions. "Please help us stop the Yulin Festival of eating dogs in Guangxi province. It is bloody and disregards life," a petition on the US White House website was titled.
"They use knives to kill the dogs which are alive," it said, according to the South China Morning Post. "Then people would like to burn the dogs, which are conscious, so they can eat them." The petition was recently taken down because it failed to meet the 100,000 signature threshold required to elicit a response from the Obama administration.
Chinese diners tuck into dog-meat hotpot in a restaurant in Yulin, Guangxi province. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex Features
According to an open letter by the Hong Kong-based NGO Animals Asia, many of the dogs consumed during the festival are strays and abductees. Some are transported to the city on filthy, overcrowded trucks, significantly increasing the risk that they carry rabies and other contagious diseases. Yulin officials claim that the dogs are raised by local farmers.
"Stolen dogs without quarantine certificates are cruelly slaughtered and sold to restaurants at very low prices," Master Huici, assistant director of the Hebei Buddhism Charity Foundation, told the state-run Global Times newspaper.
Yulin officials did not pick up the phone on Tuesday afternoon, outside of working hours.
Last month Chinese border officials seized 213 bear paws – an expensive ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine – and arrested two Russian citizens for trying to smuggle them into the country in vehicle tyres.
Saturday 22 September 2012
India's FDI Reforms - A risky strategy, born of panic
Building ‘capitalism with Indian characteristics’ means decisions cannot ignore concerns of voters and communities
As the economy slows down and the rupee wilts, Manmohan Singh has bitten the ‘reforms’ bullet with both eyes on the credit rating agencies whose negative reports have done much to dampen the ‘animal spirits’ of investors, foreign and native.
Last November, when the Congress party made a push to introduce foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail, protests in Parliament forced the government to back off. Pranab Mukherjee, who was Union Finance Minister at the time, said the FDI plan was being put on hold until a political consensus emerges.
I asked a senior member of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet what had changed between November 2011 and September 2012. There is still no consensus on FDI in retail, yet a decision has been taken to go full steam ahead. “What has changed is the value of the rupee,” the Minister replied. Every rupee that the dollar gains adds Rs 8,000 crore to India’s annualised oil import bill. “Of course, Manmohan admitted to us that not even one dollar may flow into retail or airlines right now”, he said. But this decision to open the sector and raise diesel prices has to be taken in order to stop the rupee from going into free fall.
SELF-SERVING AND DECEPTIVE
Signalling is not an unknown tactic, both in economics and in war. Signals can radiate strength and resolve, but they can also connote weakness. How will those whose ‘animal spirits’ are being propitiated look at the petard the UPA has just pinned upon the door of small retail across India? Dr. Singh must not be fooled by the applause he has garnered from editorialists, TV anchors and corporate leaders for being “tough” and “decisive”. These perfumed words may wash the stain of the Washington Post’s ink on his hands — a recent article in the American paper about his indecisiveness seems to have particularly stung the PMO — but they are self-serving and deceptive. From their vantage point in the White House or on Wall Street, the champions of American finance and enterprise see an Indian Prime Minister who is not tough but vulnerable: a man who believes the only way he can revive the economy and save the rupee is by doing what it takes to pull in foreign institutional investors and even hot money.
There is no doubt that foreign capital inflows, including FII monies, have played a big role in India’s success story over the past decade. But the problem with the Manmohan Singh strategy today is three-fold. First, it leaves untouched the very structural imbalances in the Indian economy that are responsible for the onset of the slowdown and, worse, stagflation. Second, by pinning all hopes on the revival of foreign inflows, those imbalances will most likely get exacerbated. Today, instead of being used for productive investment, capital is getting locked up in property, gold and other ‘safe’ outlets. A revival of the Sensex on the back of renewed FII interest may breathe some life into the stock market. But the risk is that this may trigger speculative demand and have no impact on the real economy. The third problem with the Prime Minister’s current approach is that the appetite of finance capital will not be sated so easily. One concession must necessarily beget another in order for the foreign investor to keep the faith in the India story.
A few weeks ago, we were told that the dilution and postponement of the General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) on tax — an important initiative taken by Mr. Mukherjee in the last budget — is necessary so as not to scare off investment. The same reason was cited to argue against the ‘Mauritius route’ of inbound investment being shut down. Today it is said that the bait of FDI in retail must be thrown to the rating agencies, or else the rupee will sink. Sure, the rupee has recovered against the dollar by around Rs 1.50 in the past few days but what happens if and when these gains get eroded again by structural factors? Foreign investors will demand more liberalised norms for entry into banking, insurance and pension funds. They will demand a friendlier patent regime for drugs so that generics can be blocked in the name of “incremental innovation.” They will rail against the ‘wasteful’ subsidies on food and employment going to India’s poor.
MISMANAGEMENT
The slowdown of the Indian economy today is essentially due to manufacturing. This, in turn, is largely the product of poor governance and mismanagement by the Central and State governments and their systematic neglect of basic infrastructure like roads and power over a long period of time. It is also the product of corruption and rent-seeking. The sub-optimal utilisation of the railways and coastal shipping — under the influence of one private lobby or another — raises the cost of long-haul cargo and increases the inflationary impact of any diesel price hike. Thanks to poor monitoring of contractor works, road projects remain unfinished for years on end, even after the land acquisition process is over. Industry is plagued by chronic electricity shortages even as would-be power producers find it more profitable to squat on their allocated coal or gas blocks.
Why is it that the Prime Minister didn’t think about being tough and decisive when it came to allocating coal blocks through a transparent auction? Why weren’t such auctions seen as a way of plugging the fiscal deficit? And we haven’t even begun talking about the allocation of bauxite, iron ore, granite, sand and water. How much revenue is the state continuing to forego by not charging proper prices from the businessmen lucky enough to land concessions for these resources?
The other structural problem the Indian economy faces is the mismatch between a national political culture that is democratic and a model of resource allocation that resents dissent. All those who are busy denouncing Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee for her decision to withdraw support to the UPA should remember that India is perhaps the only country in the world to have established universal adult franchise and a mature parliamentary system well before it turned to building capitalism in earnest. In virtually every other country, capitalist industrialisation came first and democracy followed, or the two developed side by side. If we are to build ‘capitalism with Indian characteristics,’ this requires a reimagining of the economic decision-making process. This means decisions cannot be taken in a peremptory, top-down manner, ignoring the views and concerns of voters and communities whose land, resources and labour industry needs to utilise.
At the event to relaunch Frontline magazine on Thursday, the noted economist, Prabhat Patnaik, spoke of the social contract of fraternity which lay at the base of the freedom struggle and of the Indian state which emerged. Springing from this are five universal rights which he said were non-negotiable: the right to food, employment at a living wage, education in good quality neighbourhood schools, healthcare and pension security for the elderly and disabled. None of these rights can be realised by granting concessions and subsidies to the corporate sector.
It is the failure of the system to deliver these basic rights that lies at the root of the current crisis in Indian political economy. And the current political crisis is also a reflection of the same deficit.
LAUDABLE
On Friday, Ms Banerjee delivered on her threat to withdraw support to the UPA. She deserves applause, if only for being one of the few politicians to stick to her stand even at the cost of surrendering her share of power in Delhi. Her other faults need not detain us today — most notably her intolerance. Nor should too much time be spent wondering whether the UPA government will survive her departure. It will survive, and do so handsomely, thanks to the outside support it receives and will continue to receive from the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. The Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is in no position to face a snap poll, whatever L.K. Advani may say or want, nor is the Left. In the weeks and months ahead, there will be skirmishes in the Lok Sabha and some moments of tension too. But Dr. Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi — who have proved to be superb tacticians — will survive the bumpy journey to 2014.
What happens after that, of course, is anyone’s guess. It is one thing to master the tactics of survival on the battlefield, and quite another to have a strategy that can win a war. No Congress minister sees the party winning more than 150 seats if general elections were to be held today. Dr. Singh hopes to compensate for this dwindling public support by courting investors. This constituency, of course, is happy to be courted. Whether they deliver what the Prime Minister wants is the 272 seat question.
Wednesday 5 September 2012
Some cruelest foods
Menaka Gandhi in Mathrubhumi
In the last 5 years meat eating has risen to the highest levels it has ever been. The reason for this is that India is, thanks to TV, turning non-vegetarian. Soon we will lose the magic and mystery of India, the soul and the gurus who have kept it alive, and become just another struggling, boring nation full of viciousness. According to the Mahabharata, the Kalyug started on the day that man discovered he could eat his fellow creatures. From there it was a short step to wars, slavery and wickedness to all humans.
All animals that are grown for meat are raised, trucked and killed with
extreme cruelty. But man has taken unkindness to an art form. Let me
give you a list of the cruelest foods. I am sure I can give you at least
100, but let me start with ten. 1. A Japanese dish , Ikizukuri means 'prepared alive'. It is the preparation of fresh raw meat, usually of fish, cut into thin slices made from live seafood and served as sashimi. The victims are fish, octopus, shrimp, and lobster. You choose the animal. The chef uses his skills to partially gut and cut the animals up and serve it. He must cut the fish without killing it. With its heart exposed and beating, gills still working, trying to gasp for air and painfully conscious while its body is being cut up. Often the chef will take the pieces he cut from the fish and 'reassemble' them like some nightmarish jigsaw puzzle. The Chinese have Yin Yang Fish, which involves dipping the living fish into oil and frying it alive, but again just enough that it is still living right up until you plunge your fork into it and put it wriggling into your mouth.
2. Ortolan is a tiny songbird native to most European countries and west Asia. It is about six inches long and weighs just four ounces. The French capture these birds alive, blind them using a pair of pincers and then squeeze them into tiny cages where they cannot move. The bird is fed millets, grapes and figs till it reaches 4 times its size. Then it is drowned in a liquor called Armagnac, roasted whole and eaten, bones and all, while the diner drapes his head with a linen napkin to preserve the aroma of the brandy – and probably to hide from God.
3. 'Foie Gras' means 'fatty liver,' and it comes from ducks or geese. Adult ducks and geese are taken to a dark room and put in fowl coffins. A long metal pipe is shoved down the bird's oesophagus and a machine pumps pounds of fat greased corn mix directly into their digestive systems, which then gets deposited in their livers. This goes on till their livers reach six times their normal size. The birds writhe in pain for three weeks but they are stuck in boxes where they cannot even spread their wings. Then their throats are cut and the cancerous liver taken out and sold as a delicacy for rich people.
4. This is a dish invented by people who are known for their culinary cruelty – the Japanese. The victims are baby Dojo loaches (Mudfishes). The recipe calls for boiling water. When the water is heating up, a block of soyabean tofu is placed in the vessel. The baby loaches are added and they try to escape being boiled alive by plunging straight into the still cold tofu. The tofu starts cooking and the little fish are cooked alive inside it. The final product resembles Swiss cheese, the holes created by panicked baby loaches trying to escape boiling water.
5. A product of that other compassionate civilization, the Chinese who brought it to Tibet – or vice versa - Feng Gan Ji means 'wind dried chicken.' The chicken is not killed. Its stomach is sliced open and its intestines are cut out and replaced with spices and herbs as stuffing. The stomach is sewn up again in the still living bird and it is then strung upside down to die and dry in the wind.
6. Another dish known in China as Huo Jia Lu meaning 'Live Donkey'. The animal has its legs tied and its body held down, while the cook cuts its body and serves it immediately to the diners who quietly eat it among the ear splitting cries of the animal. The flesh is actually eaten raw without cooking. The diner uses a special fork and spoon to scoop out some of the flesh from the donkey. The meat is dipped into the fresh red blood before it is eaten. A variation of this dish is called Jiao Lu Rou ('Water Donkey Meat'), where the donkey's skin is pulled off and boiling water poured on its raw flesh until it is cooked.
7. Nagaland has its dog variation. A dog is tied to a tree and kept hungry for a week. It is then given a bucket of rice, lentils and vegetables to eat. It stuffs itself. It is then turned upside down and its stomach split open while alive and the food scooped out and eaten.
8. Nothing like eating your own relatives. A monkey is forcibly pulled to the dining table, tightly bound with hoops over its hands and legs. One of the diners uses a hammer to create a hole in the live monkey's head. Its cracked skull opens from its head and the diners use a stick to extract the brain. The monkey usually screams terribly before dying. Diners use their spoons to scrape through the bloody monkey's brain. Others dip the raw brain into a herb soup in order to add to the aroma while eating.
9. We in the Northeast have another amazing way to eat the most intelligent and emotional animal on the planet – the pig. A sharp iron rod is poked through the pig's anus and pushed in till it comes out through the mouth , tearing up all the organs on the way. The still living pig is then roasted over a fire.
10. Another popular Far Eastern dish - a newly born rodent and a selection of vegetables are brought to the table. The diner uses a special skewer to stab the live rodent. The rodent, who cannot bear the pain of being pierced, squeals as it is impaled on the skewer. The diner dips the still-live rodent into the boiling oil and then eats it.
Next week I will tell you 10 more. Put yourself in the animal's place.
I cannot imagine the people who enjoy this – and then believe that praying to the gods will result in something good for themselves.
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