Money is the root of all evil – Viva!life 89

Well, that’s what the Andrews Sisters sang in their 1940s hit song
and maybe they had a point

Featured in Viva!Life 89/Autumn 2024

I’ve just watched an excellent Simon Reeves documentary about the River Nile – part of his BBC series Sacred Rivers. No matter how controversial the subject, Reeves is never confrontational but always polite and enquiring yet usually still manages to turn over the stones of deceit to reveal wriggling contradictions and slimy failures. His main focus in this episode was water use and its potential for conflict but boy, oh boy, did he miss a trick.

He followed the course of the Nile – Blue Nile at this point – through Ethiopia and into Sudan, where nearly 25 million people, more than half the population, are experiencing crisis levels of hunger and the spectre of widespread famine looms large as people are starting to die (UN World Food Programme).

From aerial shots, you can see that the only green vegetation in this parched and yellowed landscape grows along the borders of the Nile with its life-giving waters. One particularly lush area is called the Oasis and my immediate assumption was that a major effort was being made to provide food for the country’s starving people. Oh, silly me!

The project is so massive that it could only have been built with capital from multinational organisations and they, of course, expect healthy returns on their investment. And poor people provide no profits!

A huge infrastructure houses a series of enormous pipes, each about six feet in diameter and driven by diesel pumps, which suck huge quantities of water out of the Nile to feed a newly-built canal that courses around the Oasis and from which irrigation water is extracted. It is dispensed to the crops through sprays from two enormous arms rotating around a central pivot. Each arm is 500 metres long and the result is a series of circular fields, each one a kilometre in diameter. On this site there are currently 120 fields, equivalent to 3,000 football pitches.

Massive combine harvesters growl around cutting and bailing the crop. Not a single Sudanese will have their hunger assuaged by this lush green growth, as it is alfalfa, animal fodder, and most is destined for export to feed cattle in the Gulf States whose own water supply is diminishing at a rate of knots. Some will, however, remain on this ‘farm’ to feed its own herd of 2,500 Holstein, black and white dairy cows.

Temperatures in Sudan can rise as high as 50°C and these poor creatures would normally be incapable of surviving but, of course, technology again has the answer. They are kept in huge sheds where the air is mechanically cooled and a fine mist of water is dispensed from under the roof. The intention is to increase the herd size to 10,000 cattle and other huge crop and animal ‘farms’ are planned along the banks of the Nile. The milk and dairy products produced are also mostly destined for export.

This multibillion-dollar project depressed me beyond measure because it encapsulates everything we are fighting against, everything that is destroying our planet – the abuse of animals, massive use of fossil fuels, profligate water use, promoting the consumption of damaging animal products while ignoring the world’s most pressing problems.

It is a stark reminder that while we little people do all in our power to save animals and protect the planet, huge investment companies and their trillions of dollars – and who largely remain invisible and anonymous – don’t give a flying toss so long as they get a healthy return from their investments.

That, I’m afraid, is what we’re up against. It would be bad enough if it was just this one project but the UN FAO predicts that global meat production will double by 2050 and mostly in developing countries.

The big question is – how do they get away with it when all the science is screaming that livestock production is at the heart of the world’s environmental catastrophes? They are facilitated by governments everywhere, that’s how! If you and I know what the problems are, then you can be certain that governments, with their batteries of advisers, scientists and researchers, also know it.

So why do you think that not a single government anywhere in the world has been prepared to try and effectively curb its domestic meat and dairy consumption? There are two reasons. Firstly, when they try half-heartedly to do so, like in France, Holland and Ireland, farmers leap aboard their tractors, invade the capital cities and scream victimisation. Ruling politicians can see their vote share evaporating like the morning dew and back off. Denmark is currently having a crack and we’ll see what happens there.

The second reason is fear and we can see the clue to that in pronouncements from our newly elected government. As a nation we’re almost broke and Keir Starmer has made it clear that his holy grail of growth to resurrect our public services can only be achieved by attracting investment from the private sector. The biggest industry on Earth is meat and dairy production and if you attack that, you are likely to be seen as persona non grata and bang goes the bucks you’re dependent upon.

One example is big pharma, who wield enormous financial muscle with a global turnover of $1.6 trillion (Statista) and growing every year (I have no idea how many noughts there are in that figure but it’s a lot). And what a wonderful little foolproof scam they operate. It involves the majority of crops grown anywhere in the world and is so ingenious you have to admire it.

We’ve essentially run out of land and so existing land is pushed beyond its biological limits to provide endless fodder for farmed animals, which requires a battery of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilisers. Profit centre number one!

Most farmed animals are now kept in intensive factory farms where filth and squalor promote disease and so another huge array of chemicals are sold – penicillin and other antibiotics and hundreds of different drugs to throw at the problem. Profit centre number two!

The resulting avalanche of cheap meat and dairy is consumed by the human population and helps to trigger a battery of degenerative diseases that kill most people in the Western world. Hooray – more drugs, treatments and interventions that don’t cure (why kill the golden goose) but merely help to control the conditions. Profit centre number three!

It’s ingenious but far from challenging these huge organisations, governments everywhere compete for the massive investments they control – a kind of beauty pageant where a lack of environmental controls, emasculated trade unions and subsidies lure them in (and this was the primary purpose of Brexit). And this is just one aspect of the meat industry.

Keir Starmer did raise the spectre of global warming with an intention to form Great British Energy to promote renewables – and hooray for that but no mention of livestock. But what did he say about our role (and it is a big role) in deforestation, spreading deserts, loss of soil fertility, nitrogen pollution and the destruction of biodiversity, all of which have livestock production at their heart? Not a dickybird!

This may sound like our efforts to curb the destruction are all in vain but they’re not. The advance of civilisation has been marked by innumerable successful protests and battles for rights of one kind or another. Whether you realise it or not, we are embarked upon the most important of all the ‘rights’ protests in history. It sounds fairly innocuous – Animal Rights – but it is the key to our planet’s salvation.

It will resolve itself in one of two ways: we lose and the outcome will be disastrous, or we win. We and others across the world are informing public opinion and that has a hugely unpredictable momentum. No one predicted that the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would simply walk on to the streets and demolish
totalitarianism. Who could have predicted that the British would reject genetic modification almost overnight. We are hugely important people and we will win.