Similarly we have the job situation there. What industries are likely to arise to employ the young of Egypt? I have no idea. Perhaps if they traded on their one main resource, labor, they might become a low-cost manufacturing hub like China. Sitting across the Med from Europe and astride the Suez Canal is quite an advantage. I can’t really think of anything else.

Pre-neolithic humans (only 12,000 years ago) could not have attained their daily caloric requirement from the tiny ancestors of modern hybridized seeds. During its previous 500,000 years on the planet, Homo Sapiens had evolved into meat eaters.

Starch and simple sugars cause the metabolic syndrome–diabetes, obesity, stoke, hypertension, CVD, tooth decay, and perhaps cancer.

Grass-fed pastured animals are the way to grow!

–Chrissie Hynde

Here’s where a transition to a vegan economy can make a world of difference. Vegan author Joh Robbins writes in his 1987 Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America:

“Half the world’s population does not receive an adequate amount of food to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, ‘Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day,’ or one child every two seconds.

“The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.”

Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

John Robbins writes:

“The world’s cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.”

In the 1970s, the United Nations Secretary General said that the food consumption of the rich countries is the leading cause of hunger around the world. The United Nations has recommended that the wealthy nations cut down on their meat consumption.

John Robbins writes in May All Be Fed (1992):

“The Worldwatch Institute has released a remarkable report entitled Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, which lists nation after nation where food deprivation has followed the switch from a grain-based diet to a meat-based one.

“Most of the nations that now import grain from the United States were once self-sufficient in grain. The main reason they aren’t is the rise in meat production and consumption.

“In Taiwan, for example, per capita consumption of meat and eggs increased 600 percent from 1950 to 1990. With this change, vastly increased amounts of grain have gone to livestock, raising the annual per capita grain use in the country from 375 pounds to 858 pounds. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used.

“In mainland China, the situation is similar. Increased meat consumption has meant less grain available to feed people. Since 1978, meat consumption has more than doubled, to twenty-four kilograms. The share of Chinese grain fed to livestock rose from seven percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 1990.

“Over half Of Latin America’s beef production is exported, and the rest is too expensive for any but the wealthy to purchase. From 1960 to 1980 beef exports from El Salvador increases over sixfold. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of small farmers lost their livelihood and were pushed off their land. Today, 72 percent of all Salvadoran infants are underfed.

“In Brazil, major portions of the Amazon tropical rain forests have been destroyed so that wealthy multinational corporations can produce beef for the wealthy.

“Corporations such as Volkswagen, Nestle, Mitsubishi, Liquigas, King Ranch, and Swift-Eckrich have bulldozed and burned literally hundreds of millions of acres, replacing the world’s oldest and richest ecosystems, home to two million or more species of plant and animal life with a single crop–pasture grass for cattle.

“And here, the beef produced has not gone to feed hungry Brazilians; it has been primarily exported to Western Europe, the Middle East, and North America. In 1987, the United States imported three hundred million pounds of meat from countries in Central and South America.

“With the help of international lending institutions, Brazil has mounted an enormous effort to increase agricultural production, but this has been primarily meat-oriented production and for export.

“Twenty-five years ago, soybeans were almost nonexistent or Brazil. Today, this crop is the nation’s number one export–but almost all of it goes to feed Japanese and European livestock. Twenty five years ago, one third of the Brazilian population suffered from malnutrition. Today, the figure has risen to two thirds.”

Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Brazil huge cattle ranches take up some of the most fertile soil in the whole country, yet 60 percent of Brazilians are malnourished.

Oxfam estimates that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! The livestock are exported of course, to satisfy the developed nations’ craving for cheap hamburgers.

John Robbins writes:

“Thirty years ago, sorghum was almost unknown in Mexico. But by 1980, it covered literally twice the acreage of wheat. Sorghum isn’t grown for humans. It is fed to livestock. Twenty-five years ago, livestock consumed only six percent of Mexico’s grain. Today, the figure is over fifty percent.

This is a trend throughout the Third World. Copying the United States’ meat-oriented diet, these poor countries devote increasing percentages of their resources to meat production.

“In country after country the pattern is repeated. Livestock industries are consuming feed to such an extent that now almost all Third World nations must import grain. Seventy-five percent of Third World imports of corn, barley, sorghum, and oats are fed to animals, not to people. In country after country, the demand for meat among the rich is squeezing out staple production for the poor.

“The same trend can be found in the Middle East and North Africa–increases in grain-fed livestock require more imported feed. Twenty years ago, Egypt was self-sufficient in grain. Then, livestock ate only ten percent of the nation’s grain. Today, livestock consume 36 percent of Egypt’s grain. As a result, Egypt must now import eight million tons of grain every year.

“Twenty-five years ago , Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock has consumed increasing amounts of the country’s grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1,000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.”

John Robbins concludes:

“Many of us believe that hunger exists because there’s not enough food to go around. But as Frances Moore Lappe and her anti-hunger organization Food First! have shown, the real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food.”

Maybe we should have given them something valuable like wheat. Who knows maybe if we fed the world instead of bombed it we’d see less burning of American flags and less chants of Death To America.

Who am I kidding. That’s not how we roll.

America likes imposing hyper moral “economic sanctions” on any regime it doesn’t like. Except it never affects the fellow plutocrats of “the most evil regime ju jour” only the little people.