Meat means misery for the world

To have a vegan diet is not just a great for ones health, but it also could prevent people form starving.
Why are more than 840 million people going hungry?

Our meat-based diet is partly to blame as land, water, and other resources that could be used to grow food for human beings are being used to grow crops for farmed animals instead. According to a recent report by Compassion in World Framing, "crops that could be used to feed the hungry are instead being used to fatten animals raised for food." It takes up to 10 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of edible animal flesh.

The average adult human burns about 2,000 calories per day, just living his or her life. We use almost all the calories that we consume to move around, breathe, and do everyday tasks. The same is true of farmed animals. For every pound of food that they are fed, only a fraction of the calories are returned in the form of edible flesh. The rest of those calories are burned away raising the animal to slaughter weight or contributing to feathers, blood, and other parts of the animal that are not eaten by humans. This is why animals raised for food have to eat as many as 10 pounds of grain to create just 1 pound of edible flesh.

Because the industrial world is exporting grain to developing countries and importing the meat that is produced with it, farmers who are trying to feed themselves are being driven off their land. Their efficient, plant-based agricultural model is being replaced with intensive livestock rearing, which also pollutes the air and water and renders the once-fertile land dead and barren. If this trend continues, the developing world will never be able to produce enough food to feed itself, and global hunger will continue to plague hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The Guardian explains that there's only one solution: "It now seems plain that [a vegan diet] is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue."

Farmers in the developing world are abandoning their traditional crops in favor of raising animals to sell to meat-eaters in the first world. This means that, in some of the world's poorest nations, grain and land that could be used to feed the hungry are instead being fed to animals that end up on the dinner plates of the rich. Eighty percent of starving children live in countries that actually have food surpluses; the children remain hungry because farmers use the surplus grain to feed animals instead of people. Two-thirds of the grain that the U.S. exports to other countries is used to feed farmed animals instead of people.
For example, the hunger in Ethiopia did not occur because Ethiopian farmers could not produce food. On the contrary, during this crisis, which killed tens of thousands of people, European nations were actually importing grain from the impoverished country to feed European chickens, pigs, and cows. If the grain had been used to feed the Ethiopian people who grew it, the famine could have been averted.

According to Dr. Waldo Bello, executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, "there is enough food in the world for everyone. But tragically, much of the world's food and land resources are tied up in producing beef and other livestock—food for the well off—while millions of children and adults suffer from malnutrition and starvation. In Central America, staple crop production has been replaced by cattle ranching, which now occupies two-thirds of the arable land."

American companies are moving into Latin American countries and buying up land and grain so that they can raise animals to sell to meat-eaters in the States. These companies use the resources that should be used to feed the local people, so millions of people in Latin America and around the world are going hungry while animals raised for food gobble up their grain and destroy the environment. In Guatemala, for instance, 75 percent of children under the age of 5 are malnourished, and yet the nation continues to produce and export 40 million pounds of meat to the U.S. every year. Instead of feeding the worlds hungry, we take their grain and land to feed our addiction to meat, eggs, and milk.