Between 700 and 800 million people lack sufficient income to obtain the basic necessities of life. An estimated twenty million people die annually due to hunger and its effects. Three out of four people who die due to hunger are children. Over 8 percent of children in poorer countries die before their first birthday. Tens of thousands of children annually go blind due to vitamin A deficiency in their diets.
Animal agriculture wastes our food resources.
It takes 8 to 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of edible beef in a feedlot. Half of U.S. farmland grows livestock feed. A meat-centered diet requires about seventeen times the land area per person than would be required for a purely vegetarian diet. Animal agriculture also requires tremendous inputs of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation water, and fuel - commodities which are becoming scarcer worldwide. The United States is a major importer of beef from poor countries, where the grain grown feeds the cows rather than the hungry people.