If everyone was a vegan how would this help world hunger?

Answer 1

Most of the grain grown goes to raising animals- instead of to feed people in impoverished lands. sometimes grain is grown just a few miles away from starving people but it is shipped to other countries for raising animals.

There is such a high demand for animals that they are produced at extremly high rates just to accomodate our taste.  

Answer 2

I suppose in some ways it might help, but there is already basically enough food being grown to feed the whole world. Its just that it is sold at too high a price, wasted like in America, or given to the wrong people/govt who don't distribute it to the people who need it most.

Also there are plenty of places (Tibet, Mongolia, Greenland etc) where it is impossible due to climate/geography to grow a vegan diet. Those people would starve or have to depend on foreign aid, which obviously doesn't work. So they'd starve.

Really world hunger is a matter of politics, corruption and wealth distribution, not so much a farming issue. Producing more grains and other veg. crops would help to produce more food and I'm sure some of that surplus would trickle down to the poorest people, but it still would not solve any of the other problems which cause world hunger so people would still starve.

Answer 3

Well, it would take a little more than everyone going veggie/vegan, but basically, there would be more food available for everyone. You know how it takes a lot of water and grain to raise animals for food? Well, if you cut out the middleman (the cow or chicken or whatever), there's a lot more grain. In short, rather than using sixteen pounds of grain to make one pound of beef, you can use it to make sixteen pounds of bread. What can feed more people, a pound of beef or a pound of bread?

The same thing happens with water. For meat, the amount of grain used goes way up. You need to water the plants you use to feed the animal, give the animal water to live, then clean up the slaughterhouse after they're butchered.

That being said, I have little confidence that we'd solve the hunger issue by simply foregoing using animals for food. It's a distribution issue. In short, not only would we collectively have to stop eating meat and other animal products, we'd need to convince everyone who grew grain to ship and sell it cheaply enough that the people who are starving could afford it.  

Answer 4

If meat eaters cut down their consumption of meat by just 10%, there would be enough grain to feed every starving person on the face of this planet.

Answer 5

Eating Beef, you essentially take away a human lives. It is selfish and uneducated to eat meat. Educate yourself on the matter before you haters start spoutin off about something you obviously know nothing about...

Answer 6

Plant more and survive.

Answer 7

I don't know for sure that it could.  Theoretically, if we stopped feeding grain to the animals, and stopped having cattle graze, trampling down grasses and topsoil; and if we didn't use massive amounts of other resources on animal industry, that would free up resources for others.  Theoretically.

The problem is many famines--such as the one in Ethiopia in the 1980s--are a matter of distribution, not lack of resources.  We can save a lot of grain for the hungry if everyone goes vegetarian, or at least reduces their meat consumption sharply, but getting it to the hungry people is another matter entirely.

Answer 8

Instead of feeding grain to animals, we could feed grain to other people. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef, so if we didn't eat beef we would have much more grain because we wouldn't be feeding it all to cows. We would still have to get it over to Africa and places that needed it, but it would definitely be a good way to help the problem.