United States Leads World Meat Stampede

In backyards across the United States, the 4th of July holiday is one of the biggest meat-eating days of the year. More than 200 million Americans-three-quarters of the population-will attend or host a barbecue this weekend, but few will reflect on the health and environmental effects of meat consumption.

And this indulgence is not limited to Independence Day. Americans are eating more meat than ever before-the average American consumes nearly twice his or her weight in meat each year. As Americans throw more hamburgers, hotdogs and chicken wings on the grill, they lead the way in a global trend towards increased meat consumption.

The growing consumption of meat-particularly large quantities of high-fat meat, dairy products and eggs-is spurring a global epidemic of lifestyle diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes and cancers, as well as creating new pressures on land and water resources, contributing to water pollution and exacerbating global warming.

World meat production has surged nearly fivefold since 1950, growing from 44 million tons to 211 million tons in 1997. Per capita meat production stands at 36 kg, more than double the 1950 level. Today, people share the Earth's natural resources with nearly 1 billion pigs, 1.3 billion cows, 1.8 billion sheep and goats, and 13.5 billion chickens-over two chickens for each man, woman and child on the planet. (See Table 1.)

Rising affluence has allowed people throughout the world to alter their diets to include more meat. Over the last decade, per capita consumption of beef, pork and chicken has doubled in the world's poorer nations-though it is still just one-third the level in industrial nations.

This boom in meat consumption has been accompanied by increased intake of all animal products, such as dairy products and eggs, as well as seafood. Per capita consumption of milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream and eggs have climbed to all-time highs. The world fish harvest has soared from 21 million tons to 120 million tons since mid-century, tripling the per capita consumption of seafood.

In a world where an estimated one in every six people goes hungry each day, the politics of meat consumption are increasingly heated, since meat production is an inefficient use of grain-the grain is used more efficiently when consumed directly by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat eaters and the world's poor.

Global meat consumption is highly concentrated, dominated by only a few nations. The United States and China, which contain 25 percent of the world's population, combine to consume 35 percent of the world's beef, over half of the world's poultry, and 65 percent of the world's pork. If Brazil and the European Union are included, this group consumes over 60 percent of the world's beef, over 70 percent of the world's poultry, and over 80 percent of the world's pork.

While pork and beef once vied for the lead in global meat production, pork has emerged in the past two decades as the uncontested leader, largely due to production increases in China, the nation that produces and consumes half the world's pork. At 85 million tons, pork production last year was easily a third higher than beef and poultry production. (Poultry production surpassed beef production in 1996.) Mutton, including sheep and goats, is a distant fourth in the global meat hierarchy.

While meat consumption is on the rise everywhere, the type of meat consumed varies widely across cultures, with most nations focusing on a single type of meat. For example, pork dominates meat intake in many European nations and China. Beef reigns in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. In South Africa and various East Asian nations, chicken tops meat consumption. Mutton provides the meat for diets in countries such as Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. And in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, mutton rivals beef as the principal source of meat. Only the United States ranks high for all three major meats: beef, pork and chicken. (See Table 2.)

Worldwide, the production of beef and mutton depends heavily on a natural system-rangelands. Since these lands are too arid or too steeply sloping to be plowed, meat production is the only option for generating food from these ecosystems. But as overgrazing becomes the norm in much of the world, rangelands are being pushed to their limits and beyond.

The fragile state of the world's rangelands-which cover roughly twice the area of the world's cropland-is of concern because these ecosystems are the source of nearly one-quarter of the world's meat. In addition, hundreds of millions depend on these lands not only for food, but also for their livelihood. In areas as distant and diverse as southern Africa, the Middle East, Mongolia and Central Asia, the livelihood of herder populations-and cultures that revolve around animal husbandry-is threatened by the escalating demands on the world's rangelands.

Once rangelands are fully exploited, substantial future gains in beef production can come only from feedlots. At that point, the competition with pork and poultry for feed grain will intensify. Beef production requires nearly twice as much grain as pork and nearly four times as much grain as poultry. (It takes 7 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef: the conversion is 4 to 1 for pork and 2 to 1 for chicken.) Since they are less grain-intensive, chicken and pork are more cost-effective choices. As a result, while beef production has stagnated in recent years, pork and chicken production have surged ahead.

We have altered vast ecosystems and devoted massive resources to support our livestock populations, which have grown much more rapidly than human population since mid-century. The ecological footprint of world meat production includes forest destruction for ranching in Central and South America, suppression of native predators and competitors in the United States, and the introduction of invasive forage species virtually everywhere commercial ranching exists.

Currently, 36 percent of the world's grain goes to feed livestock and poultry, inefficient converters of grain. (It is worth noting that a small, but rapidly growing, share of the world's grain goes to fish farms, where the conversion is slightly more efficient than poultry.) In the developing world, the share of grain fed to livestock has tripled since mid-century and now stands at 21 percent. Further growth in this share is likely as developing nations strive to emulate the model of industrial nations, where nearly 70 percent of grain is fed to livestock.

Grain used for feed in China jumped more than fivefold in the past two decades. Since 1960, the share of Chinese grain going to livestock tripled from 8 percent to 26 percent. In Mexico, the share jumped from 5 percent to 45 percent over the same period, and in Egypt, from 3 to 31 percent. Even in Thailand, where meat intake remains low, the share of grain fed to livestock surged from less than 1 percent in 1960 to 30 percent last year.

Each kilo of meat represents several kilos of grain, either corn or wheat, that could be consumed directly by humans. If the 670 million tons of the world's grain used for feed were reduced by just 10 percent, this would free up 67 million tons of grain, enough to sustain 225 million people or keep up with world population growth for the next three years. If each American reduced his or her meat consumption by only 5 percent, roughly equivalent to eating one less dish of meat each weak, 7.5 million tons of grain would be saved, enough to feed 25 million people-roughly the number estimated to go hungry in the United States each day.

Meat production also has a growing impact on nations facing water scarcity, from the North China Plain to the Middle East, from sub-Saharan Africa to northern India. For example, shifting from pork to chicken requires half the grain, and hence half as much water.

The massive quantities of waste produced by livestock and poultry threaten rivers, lakes and other waterways. In the United States, where the waste generated by livestock is 130 times that produced by humans, livestock wastes are implicated in waterway pollution, toxic algal blooms and massive fishkills. And livestock farms are getting larger throughout the world: one 50,000-acre hog farm under construction in Utah will produce more waste than the city of Los Angeles.

According to EPA, the world's livestock herds account for roughly 25 percent of anthropogenic emissions of methane-a potent greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Moreover, the stagnant waste lagoons of factory-farm operations emit an additional 5 percent of human-induced methane, making livestock production the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions.

And as the current scale of meat production wreaks havoc on the environment, the current scale of meat consumption threatens human health. The healthiest humans are not those who eat high on the food chain, nor those who obtain insufficient nutrition at the absolute bottom. People who consume a diverse, plant-based diet, rich in whole grains, vegetables and fruits are by far the healthiest individuals. For example, in the Mediterranean diet, modest amounts of meat and dairy products, as well as seafood, complement the intake of vegetable products.

A rich body of medical and epidemiological literature implicates excessive meat consumption as the principal risk factor in the development of a variety of lifestyle diseases, ranging from cardiovascular deterioration to many types of cancer. The high quantities of cholesterol, saturated fat, and protein found in meat-rich diets are linked to the incidence of these diseases throughout the world.

The China Health Project, a joint Sino-American undertaking, examined the health effects of changes in the Chinese diet since the economic reform of 1978 and concluded that the recent increases in breast cancer, colorectal cancer, cardiovascular disease and obesity are closely linked to increased meat consumption. Moreover, these disease changes occurred at a level of meat consumption that is only a fraction of the typical American or European intake. The Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine recently advised the Chinese government to limit the country's meat consumption, citing the massive health care costs-totaling in the hundreds of billions of dollars-that widespread chronic illness could inflict on the world's most populous nation.

Dr. Colin Campbell of Cornell University, who headed the China Health Project, conservatively estimates that excessive meat consumption is responsible for between $60 and $120 billion of health care costs each year in the United States alone. Domestic cash receipts for the meat industry totaled roughly $100 billion in 1997. If Campbell's estimates are correct, it is possible that this industry is a net drain on the American economy.

In poorer nations, the hard-fought advances against many infectious diseases are currently being undermined by a new epidemic of lifestyle diseases, due to rising consumption of animal products. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "wide adoption of the high-fat, hamburger-lifestyle" in developing nations has already lead to increased cancers and cardiovascular illnesses. WHO feels the situation will only get worse as chronic lifestyle diseases rapidly emerge as the major killers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Reducing global meat consumption even slightly among the affluent offers win-win solutions to a range of pressing global problems. Massive reductions in meat consumption in industrial nations will ease the health care burden while improving public health; declining livestock herds will take pressure off of rangelands and grainlands, allowing the agricultural resource base to rejuvenate. As populations grow, lowering meat consumption worldwide will allow more efficient use of declining per capita land and water resources, while at the same time making grain more affordable to the world's chronically hungry.

Table 1. Growth in the World's Livestock
Population, 1960-97

Table 2. Meat Consumption From Around the World