The human population of this planet is now approaching six billion and, even if every country on Earth enforced a strict and effective birth-control policy today, it is estimated that the total population will climb to fifteen billion before stabilizing.
The Earth’s total land area is 179,941,270 square kilometers (69,479,518 square miles). A little simple mathematics tells us that at present, on average, one square kilometer has to support just over thirty-three people. If all of it were cultivated, that would certainly be possible.
The argument fails, however, because not all of it is available for arable cultivation. The main environmental factors that determine plant development and distribution are climate and soil type.
We can discount the whole of the unproductive continent of Antarctica, so that reduces the total by 13,335,740 square kilometers immediately. We can also discount, at least as far as arable farming is concerned, all other ice-covered areas, tundra, mountains, deserts, heath and moor land, areas covered by rivers, salt marshes and lakes, cities, roads, and railways; and to a large extent semi-deserts, savannah, rain forest, low-lying meadow land and areas liable to regular flooding. We have now discounted most of the Earth’s surface.
In fact, only eleven percent of the land surface is farmed.
Almost all of the land we have just discounted does support grass or other plant life that we cannot utilize directly. We need a system that converts that grass into a form of food that we can eat.
And we have one: much of the land we have discounted for arable use can be, and is, used for the raising of food animals. Take New Zealand, for example. Here we have a country of 269,000 square kilometers - larger than Great Britain - with a human population of 3 million, a sheep population of 42 million and many cattle.
When I was in New Zealand for three months in Spring 1999, I didn’t see one field of grain. It wasn’t surprising: as the ground is rarely flat and the volcanic rock on which New Zealand is built is very close to the surface, that country is quite unsuitable for the cultivation of grain. And the same applies to many other parts of the world.
At Present One-Third Of The World’s Population Is Starving.
If we all became vegetarians, we would have no use for, and would stop farming, all the land that will support only food animals. But taking all the land that supports food animals, but cannot support arable farming, out of production is hardly likely to ease the problem.
In many areas where animals are farmed, they are the only things that can be farmed. In these areas, therefore, animal farming is the most efficient use of the land.
The vegetarian may argue that land that is not cultivable at present can be made so, but it is an argument that has already been shown to be false. The situation with respect to land use is not static.
As the population has increased this century, so the amount of land available for cultivation has decreased. Where deforestation has taken place to make way for cultivation, soils have been exposed to higher precipitation and temperatures (4).
These processes deplete the soil’s organic matter; the soils harden and turn to desert. In 1882, desert or wasteland covered an estimated 9.4 percent of the Earth’s surface. By 1952 that area had increased to nearly twenty-five percent. It is a growing trend and one which, once it has happened, is very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
In many areas with naturally low productive capability, irrigation is used to increase agricultural productivity. But irrigation carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Semi-arid soils are characteristically salty.
The irrigation water, from essentially the same area, is also usually saline. Without adequate drainage, the irrigation water seeps into the soil and raises the water table. This brings the underlying water nearer the surface where it evaporates more freely, leaving behind the salty chemicals.
In time, the salts of sodium, magnesium and calcium clog the pores in the soil and leave a whitish bloom on the surface. This process not only destroys the soil structure so that yields fall, it leads eventually to a level of salinity where no plant can grow. Kovda estimates that between sixty and eighty percent of all irrigated land, that is millions of acres, is being transformed into deserts in this way.
Most of the world’s surface is not covered by land, but by the oceans and seas. At present, millions of tons of fish are caught or farmed each year. As well as not eating meat, many vegetarians don’t eat fish. If vegetarianism really caught on and everybody on the planet stopped eating fish, the two-thirds of the population who are not starving at present would soon join the third that are.
The British Situation
The prosperous, well-fed United Kingdom has a total land area of some 88,736 square miles (229,827 sq km) and a population of 57,537,000 (1991 Census). Arable and orchard farming occupy thirty percent while permanent meadow and pasture, which support food animals, covers fifty percent of the total area. But all of that is woefully insufficient - we still have to import one-third of the food that we need.
The UK’s major livestock production is sheep, which are reared in almost every part of the kingdom. If we all became vegetarians, the mountains of Wales and Scotland would become largely unproductive, as would the moorlands of central and northern England. We would not eat the 720,000 tons of fish caught each year - over 12.7kg (28 lbs) per head.
If we all became vegetarians, how much more food would we have to import? and where would it come from?
The USA and Canada, who are net exporters of grain, might seem to be the answer to the latter question, although our food import bill - already £6 billion per annum - would rise alarmingly. If they too became vegetarian, however, they too would need to import.
No: if we all became vegetarians, make no mistake, we would starve.
