Chapter 18. Chapter 18: Agriculture

Why does raising livestock often come with a higher environmental impact than plant crops?

Why You Should Care

As developing countries begin to enjoy rising standards of living, seen now in parts of India and China, the people of those countries, on average, are adding more meat to their diets. For many living in highly impoverished areas, meat is a costly luxury, and it is only natural for someone doing better financially to live a little higher on the hog. Those of us living in developed countries should be concerned about the rising global demand for meat. To know why, one can simply look at the reasons why people living in impoverished countries don’t eat meat often: resources. It takes a lot of water, food, and fossil fuels to raise cattle and other livestock. Several people could be fed with the grain used to feed one cow or by the crops that could have been grown in the fields that have instead been used to grow the grain or grass that is used to feed the cow. We in North America are fortunate to be able to give up the land and resources in order to have meat, but not all people are. By most estimates, if all countries had a meat-dominant diet like the United States, we would probably suffer worldwide food shortages and environmental degradation as more land and other resources were diverted into meat production.

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