Beppe Grillo's Blog

The cows and the Amazon

The Amazon under our shoes
(1:00)

Cows instead of trees and pastures instead of woods and forests. In a report released last week, Greenpeace reveals that the Amazon is disappearing thanks to the increase in the illegal allocation of areas for pastures due to the high level of demand from the major international chains and luxury brands. The housewife that buys a steak from the supermarket, a pair of shoes from a main street store, a brand name handbag or a cosmetic product becomes an unwitting accomplice in the destruction of the largest green area on the entire planet. The meat and leather industries are worth five billion Euro per year to Brazil, which hopes to double this figure within a very short space of time. It’s the same, age-old question of money and multinational companies. Transforming the planet into goods and the environment into shares on the Stock Exchange. Without leaving any traces. The principal is always well hidden.
The commissioning company that lies at the end of the chain is well protected from prying eyes. All Countries should introduce legislation to completely prohibit any activities that destroy the environment for profit-making purposes. The environment belongs to all of the Earth’s inhabitants. Meat is the new Dollar. Although it offers one advantage over cash, namely that it can be eaten, it also holds a further disadvantage in that it destroys the planet.
There are more than a billion cows in the world and one quarter of the world’s land surface is used for raising livestock. In the USA, meat is a formidable business. It accounts for 36 billion Dollars, or 7% of the supermarkets’ turnover, but employs only 0.2% of the total workforce of the USA. An astronomical added value. The world is an immense slaughterhouse that operates day and night. 100,000 Cows are slaughtered every day in the United States alone.
From “Beyond Beef” by Jeremy Rifkin:
"70% of all the grain produced in the United States is used for animal fodder. Unfortunately, of all the domestic animals, cows are the least efficient energy converters. In order to produce one Kg of beef ready for slaughter, it takes nine kilograms of fodder, of which 6 kilograms is made up of "grain and grain by-products” and the remaining three kilograms is made up of fibre". Only 11% of the fodder goes towards meat production... Each year in the United States, 157 million tons of grain, legumes and other vegetable proteins suitable for human consumption are utilised to feed cattle, which produce the 28 million tons of meat eaten by people". The beef sandwich has become the latest weapon of mass destruction.
From the Grenpeace site:
"The evidence that has been gathered shows that, in fact, the meat and leather leviathans of the Brazilian market, namely Bertin, JBS and Marfrig, are receiving regular supplies from livestock farmers that have flattened far more extensive areas of forest than those permitted by the law. The raw materials that are the fruits of criminal deforestation “sully” the production chains of many global brands and distributors. Amongst these are the following: Adidas, BMW, Geox, Chateau d’Ax, Carrefour, EuroStar, Ford, Honda, Gucci, Ikea, Kraft, Cremonini, Nike, Tesco, Toyota and Wal-Mart".

Send an e-mail to Geox, Nike, Timberland, Adidas, Reebok and Clarke's, asking them to allow the Amazon to breathe.

Comments

I really don't know where Miss Elena Noskova has been driving through Italy (maybe over the Messina's bridge?) but one thing is important to put into evidence: a bad driver, or bad drivers hasn't/haven't to be mistaken with the belief in Gods, Saints, Madonnas, and Crucifixes the two things are not on the same level.
Every one who lives in this planet has the right to believe in God (even if he's Italian)while a bad driver is just a potential killer of another human being.
Bests, Alessia Paola Roberta Rinaldi

Posted by: alessia rinaldi | July 2, 2009 02:24 PM

just read and think about it

Posted by: Elena Noskova | June 12, 2009 07:32 PM

Whenever I travel on Italian highways I marvel at the number of trucks displaying their devotion to Saints, Madonnas, and Crucifixes; sometimes the images decorate even the sides of their cabs. I also marvel at the numbers of amulets they've got dangling on board. Pagans or believers? I ask myself. Neither, I don't think. They simply need all the luck and divine protection they can muster. Last night, Annozero shone a light on the Italian trucking industry. An industry causing the deaths of hundreds of families, for maiming thousands of men, women, and children. Like "herds of buffaloes," transport trucks driven by sleep-deprived, strung-out drivers go rolling along obsolete highways all over the peninsula to fulfill impossible delivery obligations. Italian motorists, themselves an undisciplined bunch, travel along, in front of or behind mastodons on wheels prone to go out of control at any moment. And when they do (more often than one cares to think) dozens of vehicles are involved and the highways, littered with twisted metal of crushed cars and jack-knifed trucks and rising columns of black smoke and the moaning of maimed people and the horrible screams of people trapped in burning cars, gives one an inkling of what the apocalypse might look like. Trucking companies and their clients are never held accountable for anything even though they impose on their drivers absurd running times. Only drivers are held accountable, but even they are seldom stopped by police. Many drivers go non-stop for days and dare not complain lest they're fired or replaced with Eastern-European drivers ready and willing to drive for less. But what is astonishing and beyond one's understanding is the absence of responsibility towards Italian motorists. They're the innocent victims paying for the "tira a campa'" attitude. Uncaring politicians, owners of obsolete highways, truck-owners and drivers; they simply carry on like business as usual. A second factor unperceived by Italians is how slowly but unrelentingly, space around them is disappearing. The videotapes of trucks rear-ending other trucks or cars or trucks crashing median barriers or jack-knifing across the highway left me disconcerted. Every thing, highways, buildings, inadequate lanes travelled by cars tailgating one another seem to crowd everything. So that an out-of-control truck causes so much collateral damage that is unimaginable for a North American. But what leaves me agape is people's acceptance of those tragedies as though danger is part of their jobs. So drivers know that when they are behind the wheel of a truck they better pray for a safe trip back to their families. But too often their prayers go unheeded and innocent people are killed.

Posted by: louis pacella | June 5, 2009 10:28 PM

Thanks for the info. The first thing that comes to mind is that it seems pointless remarking on the ethics of being either vegetarian or meat-eating. I think that the sheer volume of demand created by numbers is having its inevitable result. And secondly, how do we learn to not want the things that we have acquired a taste for??

Posted by: Susan Theobald | June 5, 2009 07:01 AM