Would hunger cease to exist if every human were a vegetarian/vegan? How much land does it take to fatten beef? Anyone know?

Some of our food animals can digest parts of plants that we can't, so atleast those inedible parts aren't going to waste because our food can eat it. Anyway, what about parts of the worlds where it's more difficult to grow crops? They should atleast have meat to fall back on if they're having a hard time growing the crops. This post was edited by Patchouli at July 11, 2017 3:29 AM MDT

maybe

While it takes a heck of a lot of land to raise beef, it is not the reason for starvation problems.  There is so much waste of food and what gets thrown away, that if we just doled out the food instead of tossing it, we would have enough to feed everyone.   Poverty causes hunger, not scarcity.



Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day — most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating  small plots of land — can’t afford to buy this food.

In reality, the bulk of industrially-produced grain crops goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the 1 billion hungry. The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people.

But what about the contentious “yield gap” between conventional and organic farming?

Actually, what this new study does tell us is how much smaller the yield gap is between organic and conventional farming than what critics of organic agriculture have assumed. In fact, for many crops and in many instances, it is minimal. With new advances in seed breeding for organic systems, and with the transition of commercial organic farms to diversified farming systems that have been shown to “overyield,” this yield gap will close even further.

Rodale, the longest-running side-by-side study comparing conventional chemical agriculture with organic methods (now 47 years), found organic yields match conventional in good years and outperform them under drought conditions and environmental distress — a critical property as climate change increasingly serves up extreme weather conditions. Moreover, agroecological practices (basically, farming like a diversified ecosystem) render a higher resistance to extreme climate events which translate into lower vulnerability and higher long-term farm sustainability. This post was edited by WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH at July 11, 2017 6:29 AM MDT