Meat and African food

There's an interesting article on IRIN today entitled "People compete with chickens for food" (http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77780). It tells how people in Nigeria are finding it more difficult to buy grain because farmers are buying it to feed their chickens for sale. It describes the perverse situation where real incomes of both farmers and non-farmers may go down as consequently rising food prices mean that people switch from expensive chicken to grain. The origin of the problem is the expansion of the inefficient food-production vehicle that is animal flesh. For any amount of animal flesh produced, a far greater weight is required of grain and food inputs.

Animal rearing is also one of the major causes of global warming. Some people do not accept this, or think that it is vegetarian propaganda. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization publication, Livestock's Long Shadow (available from its website www.fao.org), has extensive information on the damage rearing causes and also has statistics on the input/output efficiency of production.

People in developing countries usually eat far less meat than in developed countries, but the amount rises quickly once agricultural intensification occurs. At very low incomes, animals can have uses and status other than as sources of meat, which may influence some to suggest that vegetarianism is not known or relevant in Africa. It is de facto practised there much of the time (if not generally because of ethical concerns), and I have found it just as easy to get vegetarian food in any part of the continent as in London. With global warming, a worldwide expansion of vegetarianism - or just everyone adopting a similar food consumption pattern to the Africa average - would be great news for the continent.