There's a bit of a Trolley Problem here. 194,000,000 Indians experienced starvation and malnutrition in 2014-2015. If antibiotics greatly speeds animal growth, aids reproductive success, and increases muscle mass perhaps it's a necessary temporary risk in order to increase the food supply and drive down food prices.
Antibiotic resistant diseases claimed around 700,000 lives in 2014 according to the CDC. Animal feed is unproven to be contributing factor, and only a partial one if so.
By the utilitarian argument, wouldn't the answer just be to stop eating meat and eat whatever we're feeding to livestock (or some other food grown in its place)? Meat is a pretty inefficient source of food compared to large scale agriculture.
True, and it helps that India has a large religiously vegetarian population. But that's not everyone. Government policy can only do so much - it can enforce a ban on large farms using antibiotics with some effort and resources, but it's nearly impossible to prevent people from eating meat entirely. Total prohibition of consumer goods doesn't have a good track record.
If there is a supply glut of a staple food, the prices of food in general, even not of that type tends to driven downward - because to some extent foods are interchangeable. Similar to how an overabundance of residential skyscrapers has a downward effect on the price of less attractive homes. There's a lot of history on food shortages and prices that can be found with a cursory level of searching. Each person can only eat so much in a day.
Thanks for linking me to an article about Supply and Demand. I hadn't thought about that. You are still wrong.
The problem is that factory farmed animals usually eat grain which could be used to feed humans. Even if only 10% of their feed is suitable for human consumption, it's still a net loss of food, because meat is an extremely inefficient source of calories.
The message you replied to may be facetious, but it makes a fair point. There is too much emphasis on alleviating the suffering of people who probably shouldn't exist in the first place.
In the 90s in Ethiopia there was a famine caused by drought, lack of development and especially over-population. Affluent countries gave tonnes of food aid and reduced the size of the catastrophe.
Soon afterwards, the population of Ethiopia exploded. As a collective they had learnt nothing about the danger of over-population.
In India, there's also a lack of social awareness about the impact humans have on the environment - but the issue isn't famine. Rather, the huge population is bolstered by developments such as modern farming techniques that produce food of dubious quality.
Generally, humans (in the third world in particular) are like most species in that their populations increase to the limit of what development and the environment supports. Sudden environmental changes and rapid, careless development bring suffering to many of the extra millions that exist.
And when suffering occurs, never does anyone of influence say that perhaps humans should stop breeding like rabbits and that perhaps a catastrophe is nature's way of telling us that.
Instead, with every catastrophe we hear pontificating about how terrible it is, and often foreign entities will rush to give aid and thereby reinforce the irresponsible collective behaviour of the societies that are suffering.
Does that sound heartless? It's not quite so heartless as how suffering individuals are treated by their own societies. When a society is mal-developed and contains hundreds of millions, the suffering of an individual is negligible to the whole. In these circumstances it is likely that only mass suffering will cause reflection and change.
Suffering societies need to learn from tragedies and take collective responsibility by reducing their population numbers and valuing the lives of their members.
Antibiotic resistant diseases claimed around 700,000 lives in 2014 according to the CDC. Animal feed is unproven to be contributing factor, and only a partial one if so.