Unit 5: Meat Production and Overfishing

  • Proteins are essential for growth, development, and repair of body tissues

  • Often scarce in developing nations

  • Meat requires more land than plants

  • Fishing access and overfishing

  • Good plant sources may be unavailable

  • Land requirements for meat aren’t only the area they occupy, but also land to produce their food, process their wastes, etc.

  • Green Revolution is providing plenty of calories, but animal products and their nutrients are still in short supply in some regions

  • Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations

    • AKA “CAFOs”

    • AKA “Factory Farms”

    • Fed calorie-dense foods like grain instead of natural foods like grass

    • Disease risk, antibiotics keep them alive

    • Hormones to grow faster

    • Large amounts of waste

    • 13% of world’s grain fed to livestock

    • Extreme welfare issues

    • Manure Lagoons:

      • Allow bacterial breakdown and later use as fertilizer

      • Overflow into lakes and rivers

        • Nutrient pollution and disease risk

      • Leak into groundwater

      • Release of carbon dioxide and methane

  • Free Range Cattle

    • Better welfare

    • Less disease and antibiotics

    • Less grain diverted from humans

    • Waste disperse and naturally remediated

    • Uses more land

    • More expensive

    • Overgrazing → Desertification

    • Areas with low precipitation most vulnerable

  • Fishery: A commercially harvestable population of fish within a particular ecological region

  • Fishery Collapse: The decline of a fish population by 90% or more

  • Fisheries are prone to Tragedy of the Commons

  • Bycatch: Unintentional catch of non-target fish while fishing

  • Results in:

    • Loss of juvenile fish

    • Declining abundance of even non-target fish

    • Loss of keystone species

  • It used to be difficult to find fish in the vast ocean and transport large quantities home, but current fishing methods are very effective, and factory ships can stay at sea catching and processing fish for months

  • Sustainable fishing requires international cooperation due to the shared nature of oceans

  • Sustainable Fisheries Act (1996) (U.S. only)

  • CITIES: Convention on the International Trade In Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (1973) (~184 countries)

  • Industrial Fishing Techniques:

    • Trawl nets / trawler fishing

    • Drift-net fishing

    • Purse-seine fishing

    • Longline fishing

    • Fish farming in cages near shore

    • Deep-sea aquaculture cage fishing