Jain Spirit 2003 06 No 15

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 56

ENVIRONMENT
HOLISTIC VISION
Yet this all contributes to economic measures such as Gross National Product. Economists and politicians look at these to see how well their policies are faring. Selling more sugary products or fast food to children and adults results in more sales. Many environmental costs are either not accounted for or only partly so. For example, if the full cost of water by the meat industry in the United States was accounted for, common hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound! We end up in a situation where one billion people suffer from hunger, while another billion suffer from obesity.
HOPEFULLY, ONE DAY 3 THEY'LL GET IT RIGHT. 3
fed. ... The problem, of course, is that people who don't have
is that neople who don' have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $7.00 a day), simply don Y count in the food equation. In other words, if you dont have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you. Put it yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $7.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM ('Supermarket to the World) sa large food processing company to produce food for them. What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy it and hence create a market demand for food."
In addition to providing only minimal nutritional quality or damaging consumers' health, some major agricultural products also involve production practices that damage the health and safety of workers and the environment. Rainforests are often cleared to make way for grazing animals to be slaughtered for unhealthy fast food meat consumption, while prime land and the surrounding environment is often degraded when producing cash crops for the wealthier parts of the world. The effects are numerous, as Vandana Shiva points out: "Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, the contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all. ... Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world's total grain production. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock."
Industries such as the fast food industry benefit from people consuming more fast food meat and sugar-based products. Excessive consumption of coffee, alcohol or tobacco places an extra burden on the poor and on the environmental resources, both in the production of these products and on the health departments that are already strained.
Environment and Poverty are Related Issues The above just scratches the surface, but highlights the interconnectedness of humanity, environment and all other
forms of life. We cannot take the environment for granted. Humanity has a responsibility not only to each other but to the environment too, as the environment has long sustained us and can only continue to do so if we do not destroy it.
Technological solutions, such as more environmentally friendly technologies, though extremely important, do not address underlying political, social and economic causes. Just as doctors highlight the need to prevent illnesses in the first place and resort to cures when needed, so too do we need to understand these deeper issues in a more holistic manner. Interconnectedness needs more recognition if environmental degradation, poverty and other global problems are to be
addressed Concentrating on one dimension without the others is similar to those blind men looking at just one part of the elephant. A form of environmentalism that ignores humanity as an integral part of the solution, or an economic dogma that forgets about our basic needs and forms of development that ignore environmental concerns, all add up to numerous problems for the world's people and fragile ecosystems. Some of these problems are so big we do not even see them. 2
Anup's details are in the contents pages.
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Jain Spirit . June - August 2003
ILLUSTRATION: MIKE TURNER