Involuntary vegetarianism - possible lack of meat in the future

Vegetarian Times, June, 1995 by Mark Harris

ECOLOGISTS HAVE SEEN the dinner hour of the future, and here's what's Eon the table: grains, beans, a few veggies and virtually no meat. Will America really go vegetarian? Very likely, say some experts, though not necessarily because it wants to. In the lean new world of the future, there simply won't be any other choice.

Americans will be pushed to a largely vegetarian diet by the year 2050 due to a burgeoning population and dwindling tracts of cropland, says a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Carrying Capacity Network (CCN), a non-profit group that researches the connections among economics, population growth and environmental degradation. "In the next 60 years [the U.S.] population will double while at the same time 120 million acres of farmland will be lost," says David

Pimentel, Ph.D., professor of agricultural sciences at Cornell University and coauthor of the report. "Under those conditions you're not going to be able to grow enough grain to feed the huge number of livestock that will be needed to satisfy the meat appetite of 520 million Americans."

Pimentel, a member of the Vegetarian Times editorial advisory board, asserts that about 2 million acres of U.S. cropland will be lost every year to soil erosion and urbanization. Factor in the population surge, and the amount of land for producing food will drop from the current 1.8 acres per person to 0.6 acres in the year 2050, not enough to support livestock production or to continue supplying the variety of food we've come to enjoy, vegetables included. Scarce resources will be used for growing grains and legumes, which provide more calories and protein per acre than other foods. Furthermore, we can expect to pay more for food-up to five times as much.

It's a dark view of the future, says Pimentel, but not one without a silver lining: A plant-based diet is lower in fats than our current one, which is rich in animal products. "It will be better for us healthwise," says Pimentel.

But not everybody is buying Pimentel's scenario. Among his most vocal critics is Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues, the agricultural arm of the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Indianapolis. Avery's quick take on the CCN report: "It's insane."

Avery points out that agricultural experts have shown that soil erosion can be significantly halted by doubling the yield on our best croplands with the aid of improved hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers and herbicides. Indeed, he says, farming practices that use biotechnology to garner bigger takes from fewer acres are actually building topsoil on some of the country's best lands: "There's every reason to believe we should be able to feed the growing U.S. population ... from less land than we're farming today."

Will a technological fix really solve our agricultural problems? Pimentel doesn't think so. "There's no technology around that can keep up with population growth like that. We had a breakthrough during the Green Revolution of the 1960s and '70s [when researchers experimented with hybrid seeds] and increased yields then, but that's over now." The best solution, according to Pimentel, is to stop population growth and conserve resources. "[To do that], we need to reach the public. Maybe then they'll get the politicians to recognize that we have problems."