Related Articles under H & T Everyday
is Animal Day |
Planting trees is not the answer to the dwindling forest cover. You will never reach even replacement level and, even more important, the types of trees you plant will never be the same as those cut down or destroyed for "development". Planting trees is important. Each person in India averages out to use seven trees a year - the well off in their use of paper, furniture, artefacts and the poor for their cooking. 865 million people multiplied by six is 5190 million trees or 519 crore trees cut every year- - most of it from virgin forest. Added to this amount is the needless felling for "development". A dam that will submerge 25 lakh trees at one go (Subarnarekha in Orissa or Narmada Sagar and Sardar Sarovar in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat), a tourist hostel, a petrol station that has to be made on forest land, foreign refugees who have to be resettled, refugees of power projects that have to be settled in thick green jungle - these "development" projects take three lakh hectares of forest every year. Every time a government agency whether of centre or state - demands to cut some trees in the interests of progress, they have to - under the law - compensate to the tune of 10 trees for every tree cut. The proposal itself has to identify the land upon which the trees will be planted and the money 'set aside for the purpose. Only then will it be passed. Only one percent of the compensatory trees have actually been planted in the last 20 years. Having had the proposal passed no government agency has seen it fit to follow the law - and this ranges from docks to thermal power plants - with the worst offenders being the darn builders. So this is the situation regarding tree cutting and replacement. Now I come to the main point here - forest cover destroyed by livestock. In the last five years I have received hundreds of letters from wildlife enthusiasts; I have attended NGO functions where there has been nothing but breast beating on the destruction of forests, on the denudation of hillsides, on the drying up of natural springs and other water sources. None of the people that complain have linked their own meat eating to the 180 million hectares of land that lies as denuded wasteland.
Human gastronomic choice - for we are the only species that chooses what it eats - is limited by the amount of land on the planet, obviously. Of this, only a small part can be used for growing food. In the past, agricultural and pastoral life-styles in India were not competitive. Livestock raised for milk and meat depended on food sources that humans could not eat or did not need. Pigs and poultry lived on waste and scraps. In fact, pigs contributed the important function of turning excreta and garbage/sewage into meat for humans. Now however, animal protein depends almost entirely on land needed for man's well-being. We have 890 million people and 450 million goats, 150 million cattle - all depending on the same resource - green and arable land and forest. A chicken has to lay an egg a day, dairy cows have to produce 1500 litres of milk a year, sows have to produce 15 piglets which will together grow to 1000 kg in six months - factory farming in India requires intensive feed, not just scraps and waste of little value. (Did you know that one fourth of the world's fish catch is used to make fish meal to feed as animal feed?). More grain and cereal is fed by the USA and Russia to livestock than is consumed by the people of the entire Third World. Britain gives two-thirds of its homegrown cereal to its livestock - that amount could satiate 250 million people each year. Even then it imports grain for livestock "because it is more economical to place the burden of growing the other half elsewhere. "The European Economic Community gets 2O million tonnes of cattle feed from the Third World - including India. Third World fodders, including soyabeans from India provide every tenth litre of milk and every tenth pound of meat produced in the EEC. South America's rain forests have been cut down to grow cattle for hamburgers for the USA - as a result the greenhouse effect which will destroy most of life as we know it in another 20 years, has been accelerated.
|
A N A G E N D A F O R
E A R T H D A Y
