Well, George Bush and Condy Rice apparently think that the world is facing a food shortage because the Indians have suddenly started eating too much. The statistics released by the American Agricultural Ministry presents a different picture. The per capita food consumption of an average American is almost 8 times that of an Indian. While global food shortage is a reality that has been waiting to happen, the powers that be all over the world have been maintaining a deafening silence on one of the main culprits for food shortage.

The beef industry is evil. Let me just repeat it loud and clear. The beef industry is EVIL. These days, the mere mention of beef puts lots of people even in India into frenzy. For a lot of people, from former cricketers to self-certified humourists, Marxists, communists, sundry politicians and celebrities of all hues and those smart hosts who conduct all those inane talk shows in the popular TV channels, it is a grand opportunity to show their fashionable secularism. It is their way of showing that they are part of the mainstream modern world. Any criticism against it or opposition to beef is immediately put down as some mumbo-jumbo from some Hindu religious text. First off, lets put that aspect straight. To begin with, our ancestors never called themselves Hindus. The people from outside India did it and we are stuck with that name. Neither did our Vedic ancestors ask anyone to add an ‘ism’ to their way of life and call it a religion nor was their way of life limited to the confines of a few pages in a holy book. The Indian culture has always been one of free thinkers and developed over millennia by asking thoughtful questions and by adapting itself to the needs of the times. The prohibition against eating beef was one such, developed as a very deliberate policy based on logical observations and on pure economic considerations.

Take a few minutes to think it over and you will realise that it is a very sensible and rational decision. The reality is that beef is plain bad economics. Unlike other livestock like poultry and sheep, the cow does not multiply at a fast rate. You can eat a cow for only a few days but can't replace it with another in the same period. This is notwithstanding the modern refrigeration and cold storages, which in any case add their own CFCs and pollutants. So by the time you slaughter one you need to have twenty of them behind you. The Indians were the earliest and possibly the only people who were realistic enough to accept it that it makes better sense to milk the cow for ten years rather than eat it for ten days and be left with nothing thereafter. Making the cow a divine animal was only a convenient way of sending this message to all in the minimum amount of time.

And what is the contribution of this industry to the world and mankind? Deforestation, ecological degradation, hunger, poverty, energy pollution, depletion of ground water resources, ill health and abnormally high taxes. For the first ten thousand years or so of human civilization, these things were either not known or in any case not felt. People always had surplus land to be conquered or forest land to be cleared and were anyway fighting with each other incessantly. The World Hunger Program conducted by the Brown University estimated that the total agricultural harvests from the land used all over the world if distributed properly can feed all the 6 billion people in the world but because the same land is being used as cattle ranches and for growing feed, it is able to support only 2.6 billion people.

It is estimated that it requires twenty pounds of vegetation protein to produce one pound of beef. That is a conversion rate of about 5%. A 2004 United Nations Report titled ‘Water- More Nutrition Per Drop’ notes that the International Water Management Institute found that 840 million of the world’s people remain undernourished, and recommended urgent measures to find ways to produce more food using less water. The report found that while it takes 550 litres of water to produce enough flour for one loaf of bread in developing countries it took up to 7,000 litres of water to produce 100 grams of beef. Another agency found that it takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, while it took 5,000 gallons to produce a pound of California beef. Jeremy Rifkin, writing in the Los Angeles Times, has aptly described this as follows:

“The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grain represents a new form of human evil, with consequences possibly far greater and longer lasting than any past wrongdoing inflicted by men against their fellow human beings. Today, more than 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States is fed to livestock, much of it to cattle”.

From the transportation of the cattle from the farm to the slaughterhouse to the refrigerator inside the house, it has been estimated that it requires about 260 gallons of fossil fuel in a year to be burnt to provide for the beef consumption of an average American family and all the while the rich nations are shouting from the roof tops about global warming on account of burning fossil fuel. The US Environmental Protection Agency, found that livestock waste and farm runoff has been responsible for polluting more than 45,000 kilometres of rivers and contaminated groundwater in dozens of US states. Indiscriminate use of ground water resources by the cattle ranches are threatening to turn large swathes of southern USA into a desert in the near future. This means the biggest disaster in the world today namely hunger and food shortage is the creation of the developed countries with their untenable dietary habits.

Lets turn to the economic aspects. Elementary economics require that you should always eat out of the returns from your capital and not the capital itself. But this is one industry that will never show a return and depends wholly on government subsidies for its survival and this subsidy can only come from the tax-paying citizen or by looting another country’s wealth. The average western taxpayer however seems to be blissfully unaware of this. The tax rates in USA and most of Europe hover above 40%. But what is the necessity of such a high rate? In India where hardly 3% of the population pay income tax, the government is managing fairly well with 30%. These countries claim that they are developed, the so-called first world countries while we are the third world. They would not then need anything to build roads, bridges and communication towers. Unlike the Indian farmers, their farmers are not dependent on rains since their government apparently claims to have provided for irrigation facilities round the year. We are told that their systems are faultless, people are honest, there is no red-tapism and no corruption and everybody pay their taxes too. They don’t have quarrelsome neighbours requiring huge armed forces to be maintained and don’t have to face earthquakes and floods every year. (The poor American of course, occasionally finances his government’s misadventures in exotic locales like Vietnam and Iraq). Despite all these, the westerner still pays 40% tax and what does he get in return? An overwhelming majority of the people in the west today cannot afford higher education beyond high school. Despite the so called perfect social security and governmental health schemes, the man in west today finds it cheaper to fly down to India to have his teeth examined by a dentist here or get a by-pass surgery done rather than going to the government hospital in his own country. In the bargain he gets to see the Jaipur palace and Jantar Mantar too. So where is all the taxes that he is paying disappearing?

The answer is that, like in all fields, there are vested interests that would like these things to be conveniently swept under the carpet. The beef lobby in all western countries is extremely strong politically and is the largest beneficiary of the subsidies. It is one industry which will never show a return on investments simply because it is the only one where you eat the capital itself instead of eating out of capital. And so the average man in the west is suckered into paying high taxes to prop it up. The USA alone doles out around 500 billion dollars as subsidies to this industry every year and that is a whopping 1500 dollars per American per year. Even this subsidy is insufficient in the long run which is why the farmers inject hormones and chemicals into the cow's body to bloat its size, resulting in mad cow disease and colon cancers. So this lobby is not going to give up this bounty so easily. This is the reason that the OECD countries act very coy when it comes to reduction of farm subsidies because no government in these countries would take the risk of antagonising this lobby, with a lot of politicians themselves having interest in it. Apart from this, one man’s shortage of anything is always an opportunity for another. This is why the impoverished nations of sub Saharan Africa are just kept alive with a show of grand charity, with what is known as the White Man’s Burden. Western charity always comes with the ulterior motive of gaining control, either mind control through religious conversion or economic control by cornering the assets.

What anyone eats in his own country is of course a matter of his own choice. However let us not forget that countries are only made by imaginary lines drawn by man, but this earth is at the moment the only place where we can live and therefore we are all co-owners of this place together with its water resources, environment and everything else. On that account I think we have a legitimate right to voice our opinion against the rest of the world spoiling our joint property just to satisfy their palates.