In the back of our minds, we are each aware that there are millions of people dying each year from starvation – in a single day, thousands. Many organisations like to make us aware of this but do little else. Even donations to Caritas, or participation in the 40-hour famine seem to me to be actions that, for all their good effects, largely ignore the real issue here. That issue isn’t that these people don’t have enough money or that there isn’t enough food. It’s a whole lot of different things. This is about one of these things, the inequitable distribution of food. It’s also about what can be done.

What I’m talking about is absolute poverty: an issue that directly impacts upon no reading this and very few people in Australia. I’m not looking at the world poverty that has been an object of political discussion for at least thirty years. I’m not interested in the decades of suffering and the inaction that has historically accompanied it, with successive generations pledging to do their bit and consistently failing. What I’m interested in is looking at world poverty in the modern context of the world food crisis. This is because it is current, it is a moral disaster, and because there are things that we can do.

This ‘food crisis’ might come as news to some of you. This is because we are lucky to be of the first world or, as some people call it, the minority world – a title ironically contrasting the first world’s relatively miniscule population with its vast consumption. Because of our lucky position, all the world food crisis means to most westerners is having slightly less money to spend on mobile phones, jewelry, or new shoes for the school formal. We are allowed to smugly continue our unsustainable habits of consumption, pretending that these problems can be solved without real change. The reality is far different.

In the majority world, including the ‘two dollars per day’ world that is 45% of the world’s population, this food crisis is another matter altogether. Whereas in the western world 15% of income, on average, is spent on food, the world’s marginalized spend up to 75%. And of late, for a number of different reasons, food prices have been rising. Since the start of 2006, the average world price for rice has risen by 217%, wheat by 136%, maize by 125% and soybeans by 107%. These products are staple food items in much of the majority world, and their increased cost has had a vast human toll: people can no longer afford to eat. The poverty of these people means that they can get priced out of the market, the food that could have fed them going to a consumer who is able to pay more. They can’t compete.

So, in Haiti, people, to live, have had to make salted cakes of mud to eat. In Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, The Ivory Coast, Egypt, Haiti, India, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia and Yemen, people have launched protests against rising food prices and the failure by governments to deal with the issue. Malnutrition already kills 3.5 million children annually, and this is going to get worse.

Think about this: Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. This is common knowledge and it is an event that the media remembers, that people and governments remember, that is recognised.

On the other hand, seven million children died in the time it took me to complete my SACE. Seven million. One person for every millimetre in seven kilometres. Everyone who lives in Sydney and Melbourne. And so little is being done. This is a reality that no one with enough food to eat can begin to understand. People are literally dying because they don’t have enough food. We aren’t talking about an artistic tableau demonstrating the plight of the homeless. We are talking about 30 000 children under 5 every day. This is sickening. It’s sickening that it happens, it’s sickening that not enough is being done, it’s sickening that it isn’t on the conscience of every single westerner.

It’s too easy to hear this, as we all have, before, to varying degrees and think: ‘nuts…this problem is too big for me, I can’t cancel the debt, I can’t make trade fair, I can’t give more aid.’ Well yeah, you can’t. But there is one thing that everyone can do, and, I believe this: one thing that everyone should do to try to minimise the suffering in our world.

While there are lots of different things contributing to the food crisis, one of them is meat consumption. Eating meat contributes to the suffering of millions, of billions of people the world over.

Because, to be prepared for slaughter, cows, pigs, chooks, sheep, are fed food specially grown for them on huge areas of land. The animals ssentially are transformers: they convert this vegetable protein from corn, or grain, or maize into animal protein. This is a hugely inefficient process. According the theory of trophic dynamics, the study of the energy economics of natural systems, it requires ten times as many crops to feed animals being bred for meat production as it would to feed the same number of people on a vegetarian diet. What this means is that ten times as many people could be fed if the meat wasn’t involved.

What this means is that land is being used to grow food, and this food is going to animals for meat: it is not going to people. In the US, 70% of grain is consumed by cattle, not people – with a horrific human toll. According to ecology professor David Pimentel, “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million.” Worldwide, of the 2.13bn tonnes of grain likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, less than 50%, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people. 760m tonnes will go to chickens, pigs and cows for meat, instead of the world’s starving. This amount could cover the global food deficit 14 times. The raising of animals for food is condemning people, all over the world, to starvation. This is about humanity. This is about preventing injustice. And this is a heinous injustice that needs to be righted.

Whether or not you are vegetarian, the less meat you eat the better. Less meat eaten means less food going to animals for meat and more food going to people to live. Simple.

It is easy to look back on past generations and criticise their moral ignorance: issues such as slavery, apartheid, the subjugation of women, the Stolen Generation, seem almost to be too obviously wrong to have ever happened. It’s much harder to look at our own generation in the same way. Acting morally isn’t just about taking big stands on controversial issues. It’s about living so that your decisions make the world a better place. I initially became vegetarian to prevent animal suffering. Since then I have learned more and more about vegetarianism and have become more and more resolute. The meat I don’t eat means that there is more food for the rest of the world. Food that goes to the world’s deprived instead of the world’s depraved. This is a choice that you each has to make. The power is on your plate.

Popularity: 5% [?]

When I was younger, friends would bemoan the fact that their parent/s smoked. However, they always accepted it, noting that their parents had grown up in a different time. Unfortunately, despite the wide availability of accurate information these days, people continue to smoke. While I cannot understand this decision, I feel it is due at least partly to both a lack of awareness of certain consequences of smoking, and an understanding of those consequences. I hope with this note to go into this a little, considering the negative health, environmental and social effects.

Smoking is immensely harmful to the person who does it. In Australia, it is the largest preventable cause of premature death and disease. Lung cancer, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, heart disease, stroke, and various other cancers are some of the effects of smoking, effects that kill about 15 000 Australians annually. Lower fertility, problems with pregnancy, blindness, and bone degradation are other consequences. Conceivably, smokers could say that they are allowed to do what they want with their own health. However, given that there are countless people dying against their will from unpreventable causes that they had no chance to avoid, this argument strikes me as facile. While smokers may have the ‘right’ to harm their own health, they have a responsibility to not take it for granted, given that so many are not as healthy as they may be. Not all people are lucky enough to have good health, so those who do should show proper care for themselves.

Overriding this rather abstract argument though is the fact that, even if smokers can destroy their own health, they have no right to harm the health of others: exactly what smokers do. Environmental tobacco smoke, which is what non-smokers passively breathe, is a known carcinogen – a cancer-causing agent. Other serious harms arising from the breathing of air polluted by tobacco smoke include bronchitis, pneumonia and other chest illnesses, asthma, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. An Australia report refers to increased: likelihood of suffering from asthmatic symptoms, risk of heart attack, risk of developing lung cancer, and risk of sudden infant death syndrome. Smokers are actively contributing to the ill health of their friends and all those who are so unfortunate as to breathe the air that has been polluted. No person has the right to inflict this sort of harm upon others against their will; no smoker, therefore, has the right to smoke where it can harm others. 

The environmental effects of smoking are also significant. The process of curing tobacco requires wood to be burnt to dry the leaves, which leads to deforestation. Around 60 million trees are felled each year in Brazil for this purpose, in Pakistan, 1.5 million cubic metres of wood are annually consumed. Further, paper is needed to roll and package cigarettes: a cigarette manufacturing machine uses four miles of paper per hour for this. This large scale deforestation damages the land and contributes to increased flooding, decreased food output and can affect the local climate. On a global scale, many scientists believe deforestation is changing the world’s climate and contributing to global warming

The growing of tobacco requires extensive pesticide and herbicide use. Tobacco depletes soil nutrients at a heavy rate, so requires regular inputs of chemical fertilizers. For example, during the three month period from making the seedbed to transplanting the seed in the field, up to 16 applications of pesticide may be recommended. These products directly poison farm workers – many of whom are children – and cause chronic health problems; they also seep into the soil and pollute waterways and ecological systems and poison livestock and food crops.

The volume of rubbish created by smoking, from the butts, packaging and foil, is deplorable. In 1993, all the cigarette butts thrown away in America weighed as much as 30 800 large elephants. In Australia, almost 1 in 3 butts end up as litter, and discarded components account for up to 43% of all litter in South Australia. This litter gets into bodies of water and beaches, killing marine fauna. The butts also contain toxic chemicals, which leach into the water poisoning organisms. The consequences of all this cigarette waste is intimidating, the potential cost of cleaning it all up frightful.

Only in the context of the egregious health and environmental effects of smoking can its true social costs be understood. In 2002, a report estimated the cost of tobacco use in Australia as $21.06 billion. This expense arose mainly from loss of production due to illness and death and health care costs. Other factors are the costs of passive smoking, welfare costs, ambulance services and fire damage. The burden that this is on the public purse effectively detracts from the quality and availability of health care to other people who may be suffering from other diseases not of their own making. Additionally, smoking is an effect of and a contributor to social inequality: “The greatest burden of illness and costs due to tobacco occurs among households in the lowest quintile of social advantage: smoking is most devastating for those who can least afford it” (National Tobacco Strategy 2004-2009). 

Smoking also has a cost outside of the first world, appalling enough that no casual donation to Make Poverty History could make up for it. Two-thirds of the world’s tobacco is produced in developing countries, taking up land that could be used to feed 10-20 million people. This occurs because the first world is more willing to spend money on a luxury like tobacco than those in the third world are able to spend on food. Land is thus used to produce the commodity of tobacco, endangering a reliable food supply. When you consider that 60% of the 8 million preventable deaths of chlidren annually are due to malnutrition, you certainly have to wonder how anyone could spend money on a pack of cigarettes.

There is no such thing as a ‘social smoker’. Smoking is an anti-social action that harms oneself, others, the environment and is an impediment to global equity. Not only is every cigarette doing you damage, smoking it is an act of indifference to the wellbeing of yourself, those around you, the state of the world, and the plight of the third world. Next time, before you buy a pack of cigarettes, consider doing us all a favour.

Popularity: 7% [?]