India tells US – stop “beefing” about the environment
India served a challenge to the US this week. Indian environment minister, Jairam Ramesh told the US if it wants to get serious about environmental emissions if needs to stop eating so much beef. An American is the biggest beef consumer, eating 25% more than Europeans. However, Ramesh is not so concerned about depletion of forest to create grazing land for cattle, the inefficiency of how cattle consume more food stuffs than they produce, or even the health impacts of the feed additives frequently given to cattle. No, Ramesh is far more concerned with cattle’s’ other primary output, namely methane.
The environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said if the world abandoned beef consumption, emissions would be dramatically reduced and global warming would slow down.
“The solution to cut emissions is to stop eating beef. It leads to emission of methane which is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide,” he said.
His comments follow a call last month by Lord Stern, the author of a British Government study on climate change, for people to give up eating meat to reduce emissions. “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” said Lord Stern. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Hindus are forbidden to eat beef and India has more vegetarians than any other country in the world. More than 30 per cent of its 1.1 billion people do not eat meat at all.
