Dear “Earth Talk”: Is it true that
livestock grazing is harmful to the environment? — Paul Howe, Athol,
Mass.
Most scientists and environmental experts view
livestock grazing as an ecological disaster. For starters, cows and sheep
are indiscriminate eaters and tend to remove every piece of grass and
shrubbery in sight, thus eliminating shelter and food for birds and other
wildlife and leading to their decline. In drier regions, landscape used
extensively and repeatedly for grazing eventually turns into barren
wasteland not even suitable for the livestock themselves. Further, the
significant amounts of waste that livestock animals leave behind play a key
role in the pollution of our freshwater supplies. Today, cattle and sheep ranchers lease roughly 300
million acres of public land in 11 Western U.S. states. George Wuerthner
and Mollie Matteson, in their book Welfare
Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West (Island Press), point out that livestock ranchers are
heavily subsidized with tax dollars, routinely leasing public lands for
grazing at well-below-market prices. The federal grazing fee is
“often eight to 10 times lower than fees charged on comparable
private grazing land,” they note. In addition to dirt-cheap grazing
fees, livestock ranchers are also the beneficiaries of low-interest farm
loans, and taxpayers support them with emergency bailouts and other state
and federally funded programs. Stephen Leckie of Canada’s International
Development Research Centre says that the problem is not limited to the
United States. He cites a 1997 report by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization showing that 20 percent of the world’s land
is used for grazing; only around 10 percent is devoted to growing crops. In
Central America, for example, more than a third of the forests have been
cut since the 1960s, but pastureland has increased by 50 percent.
Meanwhile, in India, free-roaming cattle and goats pose a serious threat to
tiger reserves and national parks and are jeopardizing reforestation
efforts (by eating young shoots of new plants) intended to help mitigate
global warming. Vegetarians have long insisted that raising livestock
is one of the least efficient ways to feed people. FAO research, for
example, indicates that farm animals are extremely inefficient converters
of plants to edible flesh. Studies show that livestock in North America are
fed about six times as much corn and other crops as the amount of edible
meat they produce. Meanwhile, Overseas Development Council analysts
estimate that if North Americans were to reduce their meat consumption by
just 10 percent, it would free up 12 million tons of grain annually for
people to eat. And a study by the nonprofit Worldwatch Institute found that
1 pound of steak from steer raised in feedlots costs 5 pounds of grain,
2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and
about 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.
For more information: FAO,
www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0603sp2.htm; IDRC,
www.idrc.ca/en/ev-30610-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html; Worldwatch Institute,
www.worldwatch.org/pubs/mag/1994/74/mos/.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2006.
