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02-09-09

The International Vegetarian Union (IVU) which comprises over 100 vegetarian societies around the world, at its 35th World Vegetarian Congress with 300 participants, calls on the WSSD (World Summit on Sustainable Development) meeting in Johannesburg in August, to take active steps to reduce meat consumption globally. This action is needed in order to reduce the adverse effect of factory farming and meat production on the environment, on human nutrition and health and on animal welfare.

The world’s population can then live more healthily on a plant-based diet, scarce global food resources can be fed directly to humans, rather than wastefully to farm animals and water, land and air quality would also be enhanced.

July 12th 2002
IVU Council

Environment: “Methane-emitting livestock contribute massively to the 'Greenhouse Effect' and global warming” (Vegetarian Society UK).

“Freshwater shortages are one of our time’s great environmental and human survival issues. Today more than 80 countries suffer from water shortage and one billion people lack access to clean water. Among food production, it is meat that requires the greatest amounts of water.” (Food - Environment - Justice, Jens Holm, Animal Rights, Sweden)

“The use of land for pasture is more extensive than its use for cereal crops. The cost of producing meat is higher than producing cereal thus more people could be fed more cheaply by adopting a meat-free diet” ( page 49 A Guiltless Feast by Derek Antrobus 1997 City of Salford Education and Leisure)

”The prospect of 6 billion people eating like Americans, is an ecological impossibility” (Alan During, World Watch Institute)

Hunger: “Livestock farming makes inefficient use of limited resources. Millions of people go hungry and thirsty in the developing world while grain and water is squandered on rearing animals to be slaughtered for food in the developed world” (Vegetarian Society UK)

Health: “The concept that Western diseases are lifestyle related and therefore potentially preventable and reversible, is the most important medical discovery of the 20th century” (the late Denis Burkitt MD, England, Discoverer of BurKitt’s Lymphoma)

“Cancer deaths will double in many countries, and heart disease will soar worldwide over the next 25 years largely because of selling the world on cigarette smoking and a fatty diet (WHO)

“With all of their excesses, if you live like Americans, you will die like Americans” (Dr Hans A Diehl, Life Style Medicine Institute, Loma Linda, CA

Animal Rights: “There is a serious danger that genetic engineering and cloning will be used to continue existing farm animal selective breeding policies, which aim for greater production and cost-cutting. Selective breeding has already caused serious health and welfare problems:
- Broiler (meat) chickens have been bred to grow so fast that they frequently suffer from painful lameness and die from heart failure when only a few weeks old.

- Dairy cows that are bred for high milk yield suffer from lameness and painful mastitis.”
(Compassion in World Farming, CIWF)

holmjens@hotmail.com 2002