The director for the Centre for Global Food Issues stated that the world must "create five billions vegans in the next several decades, or triple its total farm output without using more land". The point being that livestock population is 21 billion, this is 3 and a half times the human population. Rearing livestock takes up two-thirds of agricultural land, and one third of the total land area. There is enough food in the world in order to feed all the humans in the world. The World’s bread basket, the US, uses 60% of its grain to feed livestock. 800 million people go hungry since so much grain is dedicated toward livestock.
Everyone who is reading this, is very likely never to have had faced true hunger, of not having the resources to find enough food for a sustained period of time, nor the effects of undernourishment (neither has the author). Neither do people realise how dizzyingly high the number 800 million really is.

In the next few centuries, with an exponentially growing human population, the creatures of which we are most directly aware – rhinos, tigers, cheetahs, bears, camels, antelope, deer, koalas, kangaroos – don’t have a prayer without a real conservation plan. The human activity which affects the planet most is food production. The main charges that would increase both human’s own security and leave more room for fellow species is the production of less livestock: producing mega quantities of grain and pulses specifically to feed livestock. The true ecological niche of livestock is to eat things that human beings cannot eat and to live in areas which people cannot inhabit.
Enough food is being produced to feed every single person on earth. However the systems of distribution are not based with the aim of feeding the earth, but were constructed by demand and profit. Thus food distribution is vastly unequal. Ploughing through the amazon rainforest for soya which is distributed round USA and Europe (and provides for 75% of Europe’s farm animal feed) by companies such as Cargill (which is the largest private company in the world) means that eating meat spearheds the destruction of natural habitat and is the biggest threat to the world’s biodiversity…hunting is a problem concerning large mammals and reptiles, and doesnt have the legal backing of the international community which, unofortunately, the industrial farming business does, and is far more a structural problem and far more potent a problem.

Agricultural systems are not there to feed people. Western agriculture is designed in the end to maximise profit. A host of security problems such as poverty, famine, war, and corruption are rooted in the underlying problem that there is an unequal access to food. Western lifestyles, which are the particular beneficiaries of this system – and diet in particular – can play a large part in depriving the world’s poor of much needed food.

The meat and dairy industry also primarily exist for profit. However their commodities are animals which are treated in an appalling manner in order to churn out the most product- the meat these animals provide as well as their by products: milk, eggs, wool, skin and whatever other remains may be used in other industries.
The welfare provided for the animals is minimal; farm animals suffer a lot in their lives in order to produce the tremendous and unnatural amount of produce which they are forced to give.
Animals which produce foods are manipulated in such a way that they work on a maximum rate of production to their expense. Chickens are a well known example in the UK, with a popular consumer movement encouraging the use of free range eggs.
Common conditions for many factory animals include filthy and cramped conditions; enough to kill many who can’t cope, injection of drugs in order to increase growth rapidly which can resulting bodily deformations as well as mortal illness.
Those animals that are designated to breed are artificially inseminated regularly and have their young taken away prematurely before being impregnated again.
Forcible mutilation is another necessity. For example, piglets and chickens have their teeth clipped and parts of beaks removed without anaesthetic.
Slaughter is not a painless event. 9.5 million pigs were slaughtered in the UK alone in 2007 through stunning, being shackled upside down, and then having their throats slit. It is the sticking (slitting of the throat) which kills the pig, not the stunning, and there are many instances of the pig still being conscious whilst they are being sticked.
‘Mad Cow Disease’ (vCJD) came about through a cost cutting expenditure, as cattle were fed neuron tissue from sheep and other cattle. It is blinkered to ignore the fact that the meat and dairy products that are consumed in restaurants, fast food chains and supermarkets comes from somewhere which we might not like. The only way to provide such cheap meat at such an enormous quantity (the shelves never run low) is to make production cheap which is at the suffering of the animals that are born, reared, transported and slaughtered in miserable conditions for our priveliged lifestyle.

Reducing the demand for meat and dairy products is an effective method for tackling climate change.
The rearing of cattle and other animals gives huge carbon emissions and is the driving force for virtually every major category of environmental destruction; deforestation, soil erosion, water scarcity, water and air pollution, and biodiversity loss. The production of meat and dairy itself is responsible for almost a fifth of global greenhouse emissions, and as meat consumption is set to double by the middle of the century, it is only going to be more destructive.