Population Sustainability:

"The food wasted by animal production in the affluent nations would be sufficient, if properly distributed, to end both hunger and malnutrition throughout the world."
- Peter Singer

Lester Brown of the Overseas Development Council estimated that if Americans were to reduce their meat consumption by only 10 % for one year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption: enough to feed 60 million people (1).

Don Paarlberg, a former US assistant secretary of agriculture, has said that merely reducing the US livestock population by 1/2 would make available enough food to make up the calorie deficit of the nonsocialist underdeveloped nations nearly 4 times over (2)

By using the resources that we have in the most efficient manner possible, no one would have to go to bed hungry. Just how inefficient of a source of food is meat?

• It takes 21 lbs of protein fed to a calf to produce 1 lb of animal protein for humans: we get back less than 5% of what we put in (3)
• protein comparison: 1 acre of fertile land used to grow a protein-rich plant food (like peas or beans) yields between 300-500 lbs of protein ; 1 acre of fertile land used to grow crops, to feed to animals who will be slaughtered for their meat yields between 40-55 lbs of protein (4)
• calorie comparison: oats produce more than 25 times as many calories per acre as beef (5)
• iron comparison: broccoli produces 24 times as much iron per acre as beef (6)
• calcium comparison: broccoli provides 5 times as much calcium as milk (7)
• 1.3 billion people could be fed with the grain and soybeans now eaten by US livestock (8)
• 80% of corn in the US is eaten by livestock (9)
• 95% of oats grown in the US is eaten by livestock (10)
• 95% of protein is wasted by recycling grain through livestock (11)
• 20,000 lbs of potatoes that can be grown on an acre; 165 lbs of beef can be produced on an acre (12)
• It takes 16 lbs of grain and soybeans to produce a pound of feedlot beef (13)

It has only been in the last few decades that statisticians have brought the issue of population sustainability to the forefront. We are faced with the frightening notion that not only are people dying of hunger now, but the combination of population increase and farmable land decrease mean that worldwide hunger is on the rise. A child starves to death every 2 seconds. (14) Upwards of 60 million people will die of starvation this year."(15)

• world population increases by a quarter of a million people every day
• for every person added to the US population, another acre of land is devoted to housing, pavement, industrial or commercial use and 30% of the earth’s total landmass is already unsuited for farming
• if the world population expands by 2.5 billion by the year 2020, the world will have 1 billion fewer acres available for farmland
• when asked how many people the earth could support if society took all the environmental steps recommend (cutting fossil fuel use, adopting sustainable agriculture, and taking care of other ecological issues, Pimentel responded, “Under those conditions of sustainability, I think we could support a maximum of 2 billion people over the long term.” Two billion people is barely more than one-third of today’s population.
• when asked how many people we could expect to feed if the entire world switched to a well-balanced vegan diet, Pimentel responded “Right now, only 4 billion of the world’s 5.6 billion people are adequately nourished, but if the entire world switched to a vegan diet, our current food production could properly nourish 7 billion people.”
• vegans consume around 2500 calories of crop production each day, whereas people who eat 30% of their food as animal products require crop production of over 9000 calories (16)

"Perhaps humanity’s main hope is that enough people will act according to their conscience on these issues, without waiting to see what the rest of society does." - Erik Marcus




1-7) Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation, Avon Books, New York 1975
8-15) Robbins, John. Diet for a New America, HJ Kramer Inc, California 1987
16) Marcus, Erik. Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, McBooks Press, New York
1998