Veganism in a Nutshell: Human Rights

by Bruce Friedrich, PETA

The third reason for adopting a vegan diet is for human rights. In college, I was active in a group called “Poverty Action Now.” We raised money for Oxfam International and organized weekend trips to help at the homeless shelter in a nearby town. So Lappé’s analysis of global poverty and the fact that so many people are starving to death even as we in the developed world eat so gluttonously hit me hard. Right now, 1.3 billion people, more than 20 percent of the world’s population, are living in dire poverty. Right now, 800 million people are suffering from what the United Nations calls “nutritional deficiency.” That’s a euphemism: They’re starving. Every year, 40 million people die from starvation-related causes.

It is depressing to consider that throughout the last big famine in Ethiopia, that country was exporting desperately needed soy to Europe to feed to farmed animals. The same relationship held true throughout the famine in Somalia in the early 1990’s.

And the same relationship holds between Latin America and the United States today. As just one example, two-thirds of the agriculturally productive land in Central America is devoted to raising farmed animals, almost all of whom are exported or eaten by the wealthy few in these countries. Just two years ago, the U.N. Commission on Nutritional Challenges for the 21st Century said that unless we make major changes, 1 billion children will be permanently handicapped over the next 20 years as a result of inadequate caloric intake. The first step toward averting this tragedy, according to the Commission, is to encourage human consumption of traditional grains, fruits, and vegetables.

So the question is, why are we cycling huge amounts of grains, or soy, or corn, through all the animals we breed just to kill, even as so many people starve for want of any sustenance at all?

On the domestic front, a book came out a few years ago entitled, Fast Food Nation, by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser details the human abuse in slaughterhouses and includes the information that slaughterhouse workers have nine times the injury rate of coal miners in Appalachia, that some slaughterhouses have 300 percent turnover rates, and that many slaughterhouses reserve the worst jobs for people who are in this country illegally and thus can’t defend any of their rights. This is certainly the country’s most dangerous and least desirable job. There is no way of getting around the truth that eating meat or dairy products supports these sorts of relationships.