The Environmental Impact of Soya

The nutritional content of the soya bean is so profound that just 10 hectares – an area the size of five football pitches – can feed 61 people. The same area of land devoted to raising animals for meat would support just two people (Tickell, 1991).

Because of this, vast tracts of land in many parts of the world have been turned over to soya production – not to feed people but as a fodder for farmed animals. It has become an environmental and human catastrophe (UN/FAO, 2006).

The United States was traditionally the world’s largest grower, accounting for 75 per cent of soya production – enough to feed almost two billion people. But almost the entire crop is fed to farmed animals So great is the demand of these animals that still more soya is imported from developing countries such as India and Brazil (Pimentel and Pimentel, 1982). It is no accident that the biggest exporters of animal fodder such as soya are the very countries which have massive landlessness and whose children most frequently die from starvation (Smulders, 1991).

What lies of the heart of this extraordinary wastefulness is the inherent inefficiency of livestock production as a means of providing food. It can take as much as 17kg of high-quality vegetable protein to produce just 1kg of meat protein. It is for this reason the 70 per cent of all agricultural land across the world is now required to feed livestock (UN/FAO, 2006).

Increasingly it is Brazil that is becoming the world’s biggest soya exporter and the trade is largely controlled by three huge multinational corporations. Huge tracts of Amazon rainforest are now being cleared specifically for soya (Greenpeace, 2006). In fact, 30 per cent of all cleared rainforest land is now used to grow soya and most of the remainder is used to graze cattle. Soya production is now intimately linked to loss of biodiversity across the globe (UN/FAO, 2006).

Europeans are making their own massive contribution to this destruction with their ever-increasing demand for cheap meat. Most of the high-protein supplements fed to Europe’s livestock come from the developing world and increasingly from Brazil in the form of soya. Europe is the key market for soya from felled Amazon rainforest with some 18 million tons being imported annually (UN/FAO, 2006).

This feed directly finds its way into just about every piece of chicken, turkey, duck, burger, cheese, milk shake, pizza, sausage, ham or bacon sold across the EU.

Eighty per cent of the world’s soya is now fed directly to animals as fodder. Of the remaining 20 per cent, the vast majority is used as padding – bulking agents – in more than half of all manufactured food products such as sausages, meat pies, pasties and so on.

It has become fashionable to accuse vegetarians and vegans of responsibility for rainforest destruction because they sometimes eat soya-based foods. The amount of soya consumed by these people is a minuscule fraction of the total and is it is frequently GM-free so is not even sourced from rainforest countries.

Even if the entire population of the globe went vegan and ate soya products, the 70 per cent of agricultural land once used to feed animals would become available to grow plant foods and not a single tree would ever need to be chopped down again.

References
Tickell, C. 1991. Speaking at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 26 August 1991, reported in The Independent, 27 August 1991.

UN/FAO, 2006. United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation, Livestock’s Long Shadow: environmental issues and options. Available at: www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html

Pimentel D, Pimentel M. Food energy and society. London: Edward Arnold, 1982.

Smulders, F.J.M. 1991. The European Meat Industry in the 1990s. Ecceamst. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Audit Tijdschriften

Greenpeace. 2006. Eating up the Amazon.Available at:
www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/7555.pdf

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