According to FAO statistics an average Surinamese citizen consumed around 41 kg of meat in 2002 and in 2009 it was 50 kg per capita . This includes poultry, beef, pork and other kinds of meat, the origin of the meat does not matter. These figures show that there is an increase in meat consumption per average Surinamese citizen. To meet all this demand the local farms need to produce more. The problem with this is that a lot of land will be used to farm these animals. An outcome of this is that a lot of greenhouse gasses will be emitted into the atmosphere. Also a lot of fresh water will be used to sustain these farms. In this article we’ll look at problems that animal agriculture brings.
Around 70% of Earth's surface is covered with water, of that percentage of water only about 2.5 % of it is freshwater. To make things more beautiful only 1% of the 2.5% is available for humans, the other part is trapped under glaciers and snowfields. To produce 1 kg of beef there’s around 15,500 liters of water needed, for pork it’s 6,000 liters and a kilogram of chicken requires 5,000 liters of water. More than 40 billion animals are killed worldwide each year for the sole purpose of human consumption. To calculate how much water is wasted each year to farm these animals would be a ton of work. The same amount of water used to farm these animals could be used to provide people in desert areas, areas without clean water or areas where water is extremely radioactive with enough water.
But the negative impact that these farms have on the environment doesn’t end here. The amounts of greenhouse gasses these animals emit annually are so high that this sector along with the use of fossil fuels, deforestation, fluorinated gasses and fertilizers containing nitrogen are the main reasons why the climate is changing so rapidly. Many will try to suggest that the farming of animals doesn’t have such a negative impact on our climate, but statistics show that around 40% of all the methane emissions comes from the farming of animals. Methane, one of the greenhouse gasses, is more potent than Carbon-dioxide over a period of 100 years.
To conclude this article i will give my final thoughts on this subject. Many of us will be willing to point the fingers to the people working in the timber industry, because they are the so called “ destroyer of our planet”. But the figures show that what comes on our plate is more destructive to our planet than these loggers. To clarify things, I did not say that the timber industry doesn’t destroy our rainforest and planet, but if we really care about our planet as we claim, we would change our diet.