The way chickens are raised today, you'd be insane to raise chickens. Chickens of the old, roamed the grass, picking little shits that no one could find or eat, growing slowly but steadily, surviving and mating. Today, they gorge on soybean-B12 juice that was raised on ex-rainforest area. It's highly unsustainable and ridiculously bad investment. Bill Gates has previously written about meat and its sustainability and…
I'm not sure you followed the article. He's arguing for small scale, not large scale investment. Raising chickens primarily for their eggs, and secondarily for their meat. Indeed, he appears to be advocating "chickens of old" as you call them, rather than industrial operations to increase self-sufficiency. Because they continually produce food, are largely self-sufficient, living off calories otherwise rejected and b…
What he's not mentioning at all is that the Africans and Indians will get conditioned by meat. Their cultures will grow on meat.
I saw it happen to my native country. When meat was just a once in a month occasion, after just 50 years, everything else is considered food for the poor and flesh is in every meal.
Why would we want to repeat the same mistake? Condition new 2+ billion people on meat, increase their desire for luxury and let the capitalism meet the demand?
It's absolutely impossible that small scale chicken farms meet the demand of 2 billion people and we all know that Brazil will start cutting more of the Amazon (it's already doing that) to raise more soybean to get that newly discovered stream of money. One can do the calculation for cattle, and you'll see that grass-fed cattle barely meets 10% of the current demand.
I'm quite baffled by the lack of mention of the long-term consequences in the article.
Not only will they get richer, but shifting their culture from mainly plant-based to meat-based will have a huge impact on the world.
Just look at China and what happened in the last 60 years. From a country that had only 4kg of meat per person per year, they now have 50kg - just recently their government organization urged their people to eat less meat. (Chinese ocean floor is practically dead)
Not to mention this: http://globalfarmernetwork.org/2016/06/open-letter-to-the-eu...
Why wouldn't Europe give GMO to Africa?
Why wouldn't everyone lobby for more plants in Africa?
Because we want to sell that unsustainable dairy, eggs and meat.