Year Zero is the future date when all wild animals are gone.

Words by Dr. Sailesh Rao

In 2015, I was visiting India on a project field trip when the main news in New Delhi was the spate of farmer suicides
occurring on a daily basis. And I was shocked to discover that the
farmers were committing suicide because they had harvested a bumper crop
of potatoes! The price of potatoes plummeted and many farmers were
dumping their potatoes by the side of the road instead of taking them to
market in New Delhi. They were then drinking pesticides and killing
themselves because they couldn’t repay their debts.

We
live in a socioeconomic system that depends on scarcity and it tries
its best to turn natural abundance into artificial scarcity. Globally,
7.5 billion human beings consume about 1.5 billion tons of food
annually. However, we procure almost 9 billion tons of food, six times
as much food as we really need. But we turn this natural abundance into
an artificial scarcity through Animal Agriculture. We feed nearly 7.5
billion tons of food to our animals and in return, they give us less than 190 million tons,
a nearly 40 fold reduction in dry weight. Since animal foods are
scarce, we compete over them and in fact, around 9 million people
actually die of starvation each year, despite the fact that we are
procuring 6 times as much food as we really need!

Since Animal Agriculture uses 83% of the food that we extract from Nature,
it is the #1 cause of global deforestation, rainforest depletion, soil
degradation, water pollution, desertification, ocean dead zones, ocean
acidification, water scarcity, chronic diseases, premature deaths, food
insecurity and yes, even climate change. And yet, Animal Agriculture is
one of the most heavily subsidized industries patronized by governments
of every stripe, throughout the world. Processed meat, which has been
labeled a Group 1 carcinogen by the UN World Health Organization (WHO)
alongside asbestos, cigarette smoke and plutonium, is still served to
children in school lunches throughout the world, subsidized by our
governments.

What
is going on? Why would our governments deliberately subsidize an
industry that is killing us, killing innocent animals and killing all
wildlife?

Read more at Sustainable Human.