Animal Voice May 2008 Page 6 125.44 Kb            Animal Voice May 2008 Page 7 132.96 Kb

While South Africans grapple with fuel price hikes, food price hikes, the impact of electricity black-outs during business hours and toll gates, another shock is waiting in the wings… in order to conserve our dwindling water resources, we need to eat less meat too!

The media debate about the safety of South Africa’s drinking water continues with the Official Opposition referring to a “looming water crisis” similar to the current electricity crisis, and Minister of Water Affairs, Lindiwe Hendricks doing her best to reassure the nation. Yet she too appealed for an awareness that water needs to be conserved.

Speaking in Gauteng during World Water Week, Minister Hendricks said South Africa had limited water resources “yet often people behave as if this resource is infinite.” The Agricultural sector, she said, was the single greatest user of water in South Africa.

Mind-boggling statistics show just how great a burden Agriculture’s Livestock sector places on water resources yet no political figure has suggested so far that eating less meat should be part of the solution in conserving water. On the contrary, the Department of Agriculture announced in March that it would increase livestock production by 15 percent over the next five years in order to bring down the price of animal products.

Compassion in World Farming is among the lobby that believes that eating less meat is critical to a sustainable future and suggests a target of a 15% reduction in meat consumption by 2020.

“Lack of water,” says CEO Philip Lymbery, “is set to be the biggest threat to global stability in coming decades. “Producing meat uses up vast amounts of water.

Minimising the amount of water taken to produce food must now become a priority of global food policy.” The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) has called for a massive 75% reduction in the consumption of meat in order to save water, protect the environment from further degradation and help to alleviate poverty. SEPA suggests a reduction from145g per person per day to just 35 g per person per day.

Just one chicken ….

Turning one chicken into meat at the abattoir takes an estimated 14 litres of water. Multiply this figure by the number of chickens slaughtered annually in South Africa (761 million).

And the lake of bloody water that drains away from chicken abattoirs is an unholy 10.6 billion litres Annually - or 29 million daily.

This figure does not include the water required to rear the chickens or to grow the crops to feed them. It is simply the processing of the chicken.

If we are to continue our tenancy of Planet Earth, the following pointers from the Food Ethics Council should be considered:
‘The world uses 200,000,000 litres of water a second to grow its food – like gulping down the Amazon River day in, day out. By 2025 an estimated 1.8 billion people will be living without enough water to survive.’

‘Water scarcity will be one of the most pressing environmental, social and economic challenges of coming decades.’

‘Industrialised societies, of which (factory) farming systems are a key part, are unsustainable. This way of living is promoted across the world as what it means to be developed, successful, progressed. Yet this way of living and the values, ethics and worldview that go with it, simply cannot be sustained into the future without ecological collapse.’

‘World farming needs to involve fewer animals leading a higher quality of life. This apparently goes against consumer demand. We are told that consumers want more, cheaper meat. But we also know that this is not compatible with a sustainable future in any sense of that phrase. … Farming is compelled by business imperatives but in addition it can and should demonstrate leadership here – ethical and sustainable leadership. It should promote agricultural systems based on respect for other forms of life because that is the right ethic, and also because we need to think like that to continue our tenancy on the planet.” - Dr Kate Rawles, an Environmental Philosopher and member of the Food Ethics Council.’

For further information on the role of water in meat production, visit:
www.foodethicscouncil.org
www.ciwf.org.uk - The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat
www.waterfootprint.org
http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/Envfacts/facts;desertification.htm
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A070E00.pdf

Load-shedding the Meat from our Plates

Current annual slaughter figures and the amount of water required to convert these ‘food animals’ into carcasses, are shown in the table below.

The water figures do not include the water used to grow the crops to feed these animals, nor the water required by them to grow to slaughter weight.

Figures supplied by SA Poultry Association, SA Pork Producer’s Organisation, Red Meat Levy Association. * Our estimates.

Annually, an estimated 50 billion litres of bloody water goes down the drain in order to sustain current levels of meat consumption in SA. This is double the yearly amount of drinking water for the total SA population.

Government policy is to supply poor households with 6 000 litres of free water per month. If we were to save just 15% of total water used to convert animals into meat at the abattoir, then 104 000 households could be provided with all their water needs for one year.

How you can support Compassion in World Farming’s campaign to Eat Less Meat

• Consider having at least one meatless day every week 
• One person’s 50 per cent reduction in meat consumption can help ‘subsidise’ 3 people who haven’t yet reduced their meat consumption at all. 
• Better for the animals, better for us, better for the Earth