Not all foods are alike when it comes to water, some take more to produce than others. This was the point that John Anthony Allan, a Professor at the University of London, was trying to make when he gave a lecture in Dubai, on November 8, 2010, addressing the water crisis of the Middle-East. In order to educate on foods impact on water he presented the following points
-Raising requires significant water resources
-can help the “gulf countries’ serious woes”
-vegetarian american consumes half the amount of water that a meat eating american consumes
-beef requires 15,500L of water per kilogram
-chicken requires 3900L of water per kilogram
water necessary to produce food is more than all other uses
-agriculture takes 80 to 90% of the worlds water resources
-Nile and Yellow rivers, who service enormous populations
-People eating less water intensive foods would leave more room for an expanding population
In support of this idea, the animal right organization PETA, has launched a campaign displaying shower curtains which read, “Clean Your Conscience: Go Vegan! 1 lb. of Meat Equals 6 Months of Showers.” Although it’s really not known how accurate this statement is the overall point is there:
-animal agriculture accounts for over half of the fresh water consumption
-This comes from the water which animals drink as well as the accumulation of water used in the crops they eat
-The U.N. has advised global-shift towards plant based diets
-Americans eat on average a half, pound of meat a day
-For 1 pound of beef, you use between 435-2500 Gallons of water
-demand for meat on a global scale is expected to have doubled by 2050. This increase is unsustainable
An omnivore diet uses 4200 gallons a day
A vegetarian diet uses 1200 gallons a day
-A vegan diet uses 300 gallons a day
http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/11/vegetarians-solve-water-crisi/
http://animals.change.org/blog/view/worried_about_the_global_water_crisis_stop_eating_meat
State of the Village Report
If the world were a village of 1000 people:
584 would be Asians
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders
The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:
165 people would speak Mandarin
86 would speak English
83 Hindi/Urdu
64 Spanish
58 Russian
37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.
In the village there would be:
300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
210 all other religons (including atheists)
One-third (330) of the people in the village would be children. Half the children would be immunized against the preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.
Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using modern contraceptives.
Each year 28 babies would be born.
Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food, one from cancer. Two of the deaths would be to babies born within the year.
One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the next year would be 1018.
In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the income.
Only 70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one automobile).
About one-third would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Of the 670 adults in the village half would be illiterate.
The village would have 6 acres of land per person, 6000 acres in all of which:
700 acres is cropland
1400 acres pasture
1900 acres woodland
2000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.
The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the other land categories would be roughly stable. The village would allocate 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its cropland -- that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people. Excess fertilizer running off this land would cause pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, would produce 28 percent of the foodgrain and feed 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land would be one-third the yields gotten by the richer villagers.
If the world were a village of 1000 persons, there would be five soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. Of the village's total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $132,000 for health care.
The village would have buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons would be under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people would be watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether the 100 can learn to get along together, and if they do, whether they might set off the weapons anyway through inattention or technical bungling, and if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the village they will dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.
(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.)
