I'm sure by now, you've already received your holiday requests in the mail. Letters from organizations begging you to help save the poor children and families in third-world countries around the globe. Of course you want to help! But... BEWARE!
Cows, sheep, pigs, goats and other livestock are gifted/provided to rural families around the world with the aim of fighting hunger through organizations like Heifer Project International, Oxfam, and MercyCorp, just to name a few. Disturbingly, environmentally friendly companies like Seventh Generation have encouraged its customers to support such organizations. This strikes me as both odd and misleading, when it is a fact that farming animals is inefficient, expensive and environmentally destructive. More importantly, it serves not to diminish poverty, but to actually increase it. In fact, an acre of prime agricultural land can produce 40,000 pounds of potatoes, or 30,000 pounds of carrots, or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, but only 250 pounds of beef! The grain that could feed 20 people is enough to feed only 1 cow. Poor people cannot afford this kind of waste and inefficiency!! Thus, animal projects promoting American farming methods and eating habits are not only destructive and irresponsible, but renders these organizations entirely incapable of obtaining their so called missions of preventing world hunger!!!!
John Burton, the CEO of the World Land Trust has been an extremely outspoken opponent of numerous aid charities that promote livestock as the solution to poverty around the world. He has called these schemes "environmentally unsound and economically disastrous" and more recently declared that "now that the grave consequences of introducing large numbers of goats and other domestic animals into fragile, arid environments is well documented, World Land Trust considers it grossly irresponsible..."
The Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have also openly criticized the Heifer Project, and as the author of one article explains, "the roots of world hunger are systemic and usually lie in an unfair distribution of land, which is itself related to an imbalance of economic and political power. Addressing these underlying causes of malnutrition is essential. Hunger is not caused primarily by lack of food. In fact, the world currently produces enough calories to feed every person on earth an adequate diet. Unfortunately, too many of those calories are fed to cows and pigs rather than getting to the people most desperately in need."
And finally, but not last on the list of concerns, let us not forget the consequences to the animals used in these schemes. As Andrew Tyler, the Director of Animal Aid stated, "Let's be clear that there are major aniaml welfare issues involved in sending animals to, for instance, the Horn of Africa where, earlier this year, up to 80 per cent of cattle perished in a drought and many of the remainder were washed away in the floods that followed." Read entire article here.
Happy Holidays everyone! And may smart, ethical, informed, earth and animal-friendly gift giving abound!
