One million died in the Ethiopian famine of 1984 and yet the country was growing and exporting food for European animals by Thomas Swann (Scottish Socialist Voice)

Faminie in Ethiopia

In 2005, a report by the World Health Organisation showed that 1.6 billion people in world were overweight and of these 400 million suffered from obesity.
Around the same time the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that 854 million people worldwide suffered from lack of food.

These two statistics highlight the glaring inequality in accessibility to nourishment between the global North, which is the major, though not exclusive, location of obesity, and the global South, which is the major, though again not exclusive, location of malnutrition. But are these facts related? Even to the extent that the first is the direct cause of the second?

There are many who argue that the habits of consumption in the global North are the primary cause of the starvation encountered in the South, and that the central feature of a European style diet which results in these problems is the reliance on meat for protein. The key issue here is that animals which are being reared for consumption in Europe, are being fed on foodstuffs grown in Africa and Central and Southern America, thus depriving those regions’ populations of the energy which those foodstuffs and the land.

Jeremy Rifkin, an economist and author who is the founding president of the Foundation for Economic Trends, writes that this was “dramatically illustrated during the Ethiopian famine in 1984. While people starved, Ethiopia was growing linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for European livestock. Millions of acres of land in the developing world are used for this purpose.

Tragically, 80 per cent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with food surpluses which are fed to animals for consumption by the affluent.”

This is the result of a coordinated campaign on the part of the governments of the world’s richest countries, acting through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to structure the economies of poor countries to enable Western control and exploitation in what can rightly be described as economic colonialism.

In exchange for loans, the World Bank and the IMF force governments to make massive concessions to capitalism, including budget cuts in areas of social welfare, privatisation of state owned industry, and a focussing of their economies on export and the exploitation of their land, labour and resources.

Countries in the global South are obliged therefore to grow cash crops which are then exported to Europe to be used as animal feed. The simple fact of the matter is that European farming alone cannot support a meat based diet. The European Union now imports 45 per cent of its soya and 70 per cent of the protein used in animal feed. And the European Commission has been forced to admit on this that “Europe’s agriculture is capable of feeding Europe’s people but not of feeding Europe’s animals”. Our modern appetite for meat is being supported by the exploitation of resources from poor countries, to pay back the interest on their loans.

A diet which relied much less on meat would at least contribute toward reducing the demand which results in land in the global South being used to grow cash crops for export. Ultimately, this land could be put to far better use growing protein rich plants which, rather than being consumed indirectly through animals, could be consumed directly.

Prior to colonial intervention in Ethiopia, famine was almost unheard of. There was always enough of an agricultural output to store a significant amount in case of flood or drought. Now, the privatisation of the food industry has prohibited granaries and other storage facilities being built, because to fill them would remove crops from the market, and that would mean a drop in profits.

The effects of this horrendous policy have already been highlighted: while over one million men, women and children dies from starvation in 1984, food was being grown and exported for animals in Europe to eat.

But it would be naive to blame this on the existence of meat based diets in Europe. The blame has to be laid squarely on the financial institutions and Western governments who promoted the economic policy which has led to these extremes of exploitation.

Indeed, European diets have changed dramatically to include far more meat than they ever have in the past, in order to provide a market for these exploited resources.

Populations of European countries have been exploited not as producers, but as consumers in this system, and have been manipulated through advertising to rely more and more on the final product in this disturbing and horrific economic chain.

It would be ridiculous also, to argue, as many do, that to reject a meat based diet on a collective level would be to contribute to ending world hunger. The organisation Viva! (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) concludes a pamphlet on the issue by saying that “vegetarianism, by using up far less of the world’s resources, is a positive step that we can all easily take to help feed people in poorer countries”.

Yes, if we in Europe were to stop eating meat, or even to reduce our reliance on meat for protein, through cutting down to, for example, pre- Second World War levels of consumption, the land in the global South which currently supports our livestock agriculture would be able to be used for some other purpose.

But the World Bank and the IMF would still retain their stranglehold on these poor countries and surely this alternative use would be one which would prove equally profitable of capitalist enterprises.

Perhaps, the land which now grows animal feed would instead grow plants to be used in biofuels production.
The point is that any action against this system must be aimed the root of the system, and that is the neo-colonial exploitation of the global South by rich governments operating through the World Bank and the IMF.

However, this being said, vegetarianism, or to be even more radical, veganism, may well be realities we in Europe will have to deal with. If one accepts that Europe has only a limited capacity in terms of production for agriculture, then one must also accept that there will be a maximum population, depending on that population’s diet, which that agricultural output can support. An area of land simply cannot feed an unlimited number of people. As even the European Commission has noted, reported above, Europe’s agriculture can support the people of Europe, but not the animals necessary for a meat based diet.

As the crisis of peak-oil draws near, a food industry which relies on transporting goods from one side of the planet to another will not be possible. This system of transferring energy is itself far too energy hungry and there will soon not be the vast supplies of oil which fuel this practise. Solutions to peak-oil, such as transition towns, focus on local agriculture meeting populations’ needs for this very reason. And based on local agriculture, Europe can only support its population on a meat free diet, or rather, an animal product free diet, which would mean veganism rather than vegetarianism.

A report by Brown University in the US in 1991, which took the entire world into account, estimated that the planet’s farming can support around 3 billion people on a meat based diet. On a vegan diet, this number increases to around 6 billion.

From this alone it is clear that even though adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet won’t save the world, it will undoubtedly be part of a sustainable society based on local agriculture and not on an exploitation of the global South as occurs now.

In recent weeks, the UN has come out to call for a reduction in the amount of meat included in Western diets. However, the motives expressed by the chairperson of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were not those outlined above. Rather than focus on the direct human cost of intensive meat production, Rajendra Pachauri, called into question Western diets on grounds of the environmental impact such practises have.

Echoing these concerns, the Worldwatch Institute argues that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future: deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilisation of communities and the spread of disease”. This is an issue that has been covered in a previous issue of the Voice so I won’t go into any detail here.

The approach which is now being promoted by Pachauri, cutting meat out for one day a week and developing from there, is still based solely on action from individuals in the richer countries, and refuses to acknowledge the manipulating role played by governments and the World Bank and the IMF.

The point cannot be stressed enough that the blame lies at the door of institutions and governments which are controlling the international trade system which has caused such a massive increase in meat consumption in the global North coupled with a dramatic restructuring of economies in the global South on exporting foodstuffs. A transition to a sustainable, vegetarian or vegan diet in Europe and other parts of the richer world is necessary, but without action against the World Bank, the IMF and the governments which support them, a sustainable society will forever be denied to the poor countries of the world.

So, in short, we must give up meat, over a period of time to allow everyone to adjust, while at the same time not putting all out faith in that as a solution. The real solution must come through finding ways to allow the global South to develop their own sustainable and independent economies. Adopting a meat or animal product free diet is simply out way of, on the one hand, creating our own locally sustainable economy, while on the other, showing solidarity with the poor of the world that we are prepared to do what is necessary to ensure a good quality of life for everyone.