A Vegan World Would Reduce Global Hunger

A short, evidence heavy article, providing just one more reason to be vegan

2.3 billion people are food insecure and 828 million people are affected by hunger globally. This hunger is generally far more severe than U.S. hunger, with the U.S. being one of the richest countries in the world. We use 77% of global farmland to feed animals which we then feed to ourselves. 11 people die a minute from hunger. We could produce food far more efficiently if we fed the food to ourselves and to the global poor rather than sustaining the lot of poor, tortured, miserable cows, pigs chickens, and turkeys.

Plants that we eat are far more calorically efficient than animals—for we squander enormous amounts of energy as deadweight loss when we feed plants to animals and animals to us. As Ritchie notes “The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.” If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares.

People often worry that we couldn’t feed the world on a plant-based diet because much of the world’s farmland couldn’t produce crops that we feed to humans. But, as this thread explains, this is wrong. For one, plant products are so much more efficient that this more than makes up for this deficit. Additionally, much of the supposedly inhospitable farmland is able to grow crops, just not as well. Thus, if it was needed, it would support crops.

As Faunalytics says “According to the largest statistical analysis of global food systems to date, if everyone in the world adopted a plant-based diet, the world population could be fed using only 25% of the land that we use today.”

Pimentel and Pimentel find “The meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet.”