The trouble with meat - foodborne pathogens - includes related articles - Cover Story

E: The Environmental Magazine, May-June, 1998 by Jim Motavalli, Tracey C. Rembert

Lester Brown of The Worldwatch Institute, whose report on likely grain shortages in China caused an international furor in 1996, says, "What's happening in China teaches us that, despite rising affluence, our likely world population of 10 billion people won't be able to five as high on the food chain as the average American. There simply won't be enough food. Much of the animal overgrazing we first reported in a 1991 paper is worse now than it was then. The pressures on the world's rangelands are more serious than those on oceanic fisheries. We're pushing our natural systems to their limits and beyond, with the likely result that well see the growing impoverishment of rural areas."

It isn't only developing countries that may be forced to reverse the current world trend toward heavier meat consumption. Brown's position is bolstered by a 1995 report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which said that Americans win probably be eating far less meat and dairy products by 2050. U.S. croplands, the report said, have reached the limits of production, even as the U.S. population is projected to double in 50 years. The result, says association member David Pimentel of Cornell University, is that the U.S. could cease to be a food exporter by 2025, and the American diet, now 31 percent animal products, could drop to only 15 percent.

In 1996, the World Food Summit in Rome took a decidedly pessimistic tone about world food production, warning of an "unthinkable Malthusian nightmare" if global output is not doubled in the next 30 years to meet an expanding population and an increasing demand for meat. According to the British Independent, more than 800 million people do not get enough food to meet their basic needs, and 82 countries -- half of them in Africa -- neither grow enough food for their population nor can afford to import it.

Waste and Danger

China may be developing U.S.-style factory farming, but such intensive methods are still unknown in the Third World, where raising animals for slaughter is a much more haphazard affair. Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, for instance, has no slaughterhouse at all, and animals are usually killed by meat vendors themselves, often under totally unhygienic conditions. (One popular site is located behind the toilets of a local pub.) Tanzania's agricultural ministry has warned of outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and tuberculosis if uncontrolled slaughter continues.

Cattle, sheep and goats graze half of the planets land area, which is increasingly becoming depleted as a resist. The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of the world's eight billion acres of dry range land is at least moderately desertified. As Worldwatch reports, persistent grazing makes bare ground impermeable to rain, which then runs off, carrying topsoil with it. The picture is not much better in wetter regions, because cattle have to compete with farmers and are crowded into small areas, accelerating erosion and degradation.

Another major problem is animal wastes, which wash off farms and into rivers and streams, polluting everything from groundwater in the Czech Republic to the Chesapeake Bay. In the U.S., years of dumping hog waste into North Carolina rivers has led to the bizarre spectacle of Pfiesteria piscicida, a seemingly innocuous phytoplankton that, in the presence of phosphates from nutrient-rich wastes, turns into voracious "flagellated vegetative cells" that kill fish and are extremely toxic to humans.