20 million tonnes of grain protein provide two million tonnes of animal protein. Seven kg of grain produce one kg of meat. What about the fossil fuel energy required? One protein unit of soyabean, rice or wheat takes an energy factor of between two to 10 to produce. Beef, pork, eggs, milk, mutton take from 10 to 78! Can we afford this energy so that a few people can eat meat?

What about land use? Each goat or sheep in India costs the nation Rs 25,000. It brings its owner a profit of between Rs 500 to Rs.900. Why do I differentiate? Because 98 per cent of the goats and sheep feed off the hoof – on forest land, in the heart of the jungle, on hillsides on roadsides, on village panchayat land, on government land that is totally ravaged by the animal and has to be replanted by the government – which neither has the resources nor the agencies that can do this repair work. As a result Haryana's water level has fallen because the lower Shivalik hills have been rendered barren by goats and the streams coming into Haryana have dried up.

All the Project Tiger areas and indeed all the national parks are failing or are on the verge of extinction (as is Bharatpur bird sanctuary) because of the huge inflow of cattle and goats that eat up all the young shoots - and whose owners murder the wild animals to protect their meat.

Seventy per cent of all planting efforts by forest departments are doomed to failure because the grazing animal eats the young plant. As a result even the planting patterns change - for instance, the Delhi administration does not have the money to provide tree guards. So they plant only those trees that are not eaten by the 17000 milk producing cattle and the thousands of goats let loose on the city and its peripheral villages daily. Consequently, Delhi is saturated with ugly false Ashoka, Alstoltia scholaris, Oleander and Bougain-villea - and that's all. Gujarat is full of Ganda Bawal (the mad tree) Prosopis juliflora, that neither gives flowers, fruit, shade or lets any other tree grow in the vicinity.

A single sheep or goal eats the equivalent of four hectares each year. Its average lifetime is four years - it destroys 16 hectares (35.2 acres) of government land before it is killed to feed only the upper middle classes of this country. On the other hand the loss of tree cover and biomass is felt most keenly by the poor. The government requires Rs 6000 to re-green one hectare - provided it has not been overgrazed and completely de-topsoiled. The forest departments get very little of the state budget - sometimes one per cent. So they have a limited target of a few thousand hectares a year to plant. The total denudation, however, is closer to 450 million goats multiplied by four hectares.

Apart from the free food that our forests provide we have diverted enormous amounts of land to grow fodder for these meat eating animals – land that have been used to grow wheat for our poor. Even then the National Commission on Agriculture says that our grown fodder shortage is 38 percent so more land will have to be put aside to grow meat, as it were.

We even proudly export meat to the Middle East – and this year the Commerce Ministry is looking for an enhancement of targets. Which means that we put ourselves in the same position as South America – a slave country that destroys itself (for destroying green cover is the end of all life) to feed another country. Each kilo exported may earn us, say, Rs.100. We have to use five times that amount to repair the damage done to our natural resources in growing that meat.

In other words, the more we sell, the power we grow. This has been the case with South America and this is the case with India. For instance, most of our goats feed on the Aravalli hills which are now so barren that their dust fills Delhi’s air. To re-green them, we have taken a loan from Japan of 63 million dollars – less than what we earned in the last five years from exporting these Aravalli-fed goats. Are we richer or poorer?