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Benjamin McKeown

Does it really take 20,000L of water to produce 1kg of beef? - Beef Central - 0 views

www.beefcentral.com/...f-water-to-produce-1kg-of-beef

water food energy Nexus water water footprint

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 13 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • These were his calculations: “Say a two year old grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is 60 percent. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the animal drinks 40 litres /day (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.
  • However, while that statement was referenced in the report, the specific reference was missing from the list of references at the end of the report.
  • In the article Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing one kilogram of boneless beef required about 155 litres of water, taking into account only the water used for drinking and servicing that animal. However, when you added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to grow those feed sources, he said the water footprint of 1 kg of beef would add up to 15,500 litres of water.
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  • Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to account for the total amount of water used to produce something.
  • Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in most estimates of water footprints are flawed, and that water footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative bas
  • A key concern was that ‘Water Footprints’ made no allowance for whether a producing area is water- plentiful or water-short.
  • “One must consider the scarcity or abundance of water and land, as well as downstream water uses to evaluate the significance of any environmental impact when compared to the status of these variables in the absence of grain or meat production. Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental information.
  • “It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of water use.” “…Generalised water footprints are neither accurate nor helpful indicators for gaining a better understanding of water resource management.”
  • Previous media articles have reported claims that it takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of red meat. But these reported measures count every single drop of water that falls on an area of land grazed by cattle over the space of a year. And they do not take into account the fact that most of the water ends up in waterways, is used by trees and plants and in pastures, not grazed by cattle. “These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef production, whereby the water is clearly being used for other purposes, such as supporting ecosystems” MLA explains in its Target 100 page.
Benjamin McKeown

How Successful Were the Millennium Development Goals? A Final Report | New Security Beat - 0 views

www.newsecuritybeat.org/...development-goals-final-report

MDG

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “despite many successes, the poorest and most vulnerable people are being left behind.”
  • eport calls for better data collection practices to create a post-2015 development agenda that can overcome the MDG’s shortcomings.
  • number of people living in extreme poverty and proportion of undernourished people in developing regions has declined by more than half since 1990,
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  • The maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 percent worldwide, and the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source rose from 76 percent to 91 percent
  • Those still left out, however, are increasingly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and all across the globe, women and young people face the highest odds of living in poverty
  • Conflict and displacement is taking a toll as well.
  • While hunger has fallen in most areas, projections indicate that the prevalence of undernourishment in the Middle East will rise by 32 percent between 2014 and 2016 due to war, civil unrest, and increasing numbers of refugees.
  • Progress in maternal health is sharply divided along rural-urban lines
  • marginalized and easily forgotten amidst promising overall trends. “Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity, or geographic location,”
  • We need to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development,
  • “employment opportunities have diminished in both developing and developed regions
  • he employment-to-population ratio, which measures what percentage of the working population is employed, has declined around the world since 1990 with the biggest drops in East and South Asia.
  • rapid urbanization is taxing already-inadequate infrastructure. The proportion of the urban population living in slums in developing regions fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2014, surpassing the MDG target. However, the total number of urban residents living in slums continues to grow as a result of accelerating urbanization and population growth
  • Population growth and increased consumption have also stressed the environment, presenting challenges that overshadow progress on the seventh MDG
  • While ozone-depleting substances have nearly been eliminated since 1990 and the ozone layer is expected to recover by midcentury, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 50 percent in the past 25 years
  • Between 1998 and 2011, the number of countries experiencing water stress increased from 36 to 41. Water scarcity currently affects more than 40 percent of the world population, a statistic that is only projected to increase.
  • For the global poor whose livelihoods are directly tied to natural resources and suffer the most from environmental degradation, climate change hinders development in other sectors. That’s why environmental change is a much bigger focus in the Sustainable Development Goals, set to be adopted later this year.
Benjamin McKeown

Advertising and Global Culture | Cultural Survival - 0 views

www.culturalsurvival.org/...advertising-and-global-culture

culture HL TNC

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19 - No Cached
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  • Author Janus Noreen No one can travel to Africa, Asia, or Latin America and not be struck by the Western elements of urban life. The symbols of transnational culture - automobiles, advertising, supermarkets, shopping centers, hotels, fast food chains, credit cards, and Hollywood movies - give the, feeling of being at home. Behind these tangible symbols are a corresponding set of values and attitudes about time, consumption, work relations, etc. Some believe global culture has resulted from gradual spontaneous processes that depended solely on technological innovations - increased international trade, global mass communications, jet travel. Recent studies show that the processes are anything but spontaneous; that they are the result of tremendous investments of time, energy and money by transnational corporations. This "transnational culture" is a direct outcome of the internationalization of production and accumulation promoted through standardized development models and cultural forms.
  • The common theme of transnational culture is consumption. Advertising expresses this ideology of consumption in its most synthetic and visual form.
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  • Advertisers rely on few themes: happiness, youth, success, status, luxury, fashion, and beauty. In advertising, social contradictions and class differences are masked and workplace conflicts are not shown. Advertising campaigns suggest that solutions to human problems are to be found in individual consumption, presented as an ideal outlet for mass energies...a socially acceptable form of action and participation which can be used to defuse potential political unrest. "Consumer democracy" is held out to the poor around the world as a substitute for political democracy.
  • Transnational advertising is one of the major reasons both for the spread of transnational culture and the breakdown of traditional cultures.
  • Transnational culture strives to eliminate local cultural variations. Barnett and Muller discuss the social impact of this process:
  • What are the long range social effects of advertising on people who earn less than $200 a year? (Peasants, domestic workers, and laborers) learn of the outside world through the images and slogans of advertising. One message that comes through clearly is that happiness, achievement, and being white have something to do with one another
  • In mestizo countries (sic) such as Mexico and Venezuela where most of the population still bear strong traces of their Indian origin, billboards depicting the good life for sale invariably feature blond, blue-eyed American-looking men and women. One effect of such "white is beautiful" advertising is to reinforce feelings of inferiority which are the essence of a politically immobilizing colonial mentality...The subtle message of the global advertiser in poor countries is "Neither you nor what you create are worth very much, we will sell you a civilization (emphasis added).
  • Transnational firms and global advertising agencies are clearly aware of the role of advertising in the creation of a new consumer culture in Third World countries
  • Television antennas are gradually taking the plac
  • tom-tom drums across the vast stretches of Africa. Catchy jingles are replacing tribal calls in the Andes of Latin America. Spic-and-span supermarkets stand, on the grounds where colorful wares of an Oriental Bazaar were once spread throughout Asia. Across vast continents hundreds of millions of people are awakening to the beat of modern times.
  • Increasingly advertising campaigns are aimed at the vast numbers of poor in Third World countries
  • As one U.S. advertising executive observes about the Mexican consumer market, even poor families, when living together and pooling their incomes, can add up to a household income of more than $10,000 per year
  • The use of television to spread transnational culture is especially effective with illiterates
  • By consuming Coca-Cola, Nestle products, Marlboro, Maggi, Colgate or Revlon, Ivorians are not only fulfilling unnecessary needs but also progressively relinquishing their authentic world outlook in favor of the transnational way of life.
  • In trying to be as white as possible, that is to say, in becoming ashamed of their traditional being, the Ivorians are at the same time relinquishing one of the most powerful weapons at their disposal for safeguarding their dignity as human beings: their racial identify. And advertising is not neutral in such a state of affairs.
  • Yet, the advertising of Coca-Cola and Heinekens portrays drinking as an individual act rather than a collective one.
  • Santoro concluded that these stereotypes held by children were largely the same ones to be found in typical Venezuelan television and advertising contents.
  • These results, while very tentative, suggest that the impact of transnational culture is greater among the poor - the very people who cannot afford to buy the lifestyle it represents. The poor are more likely to associate consumption with happiness and feel that industrialized products are better than the locally made ones. But at the same time they are painfully aware that only the rich have access to the lifestyle portrayed.
  • Virtually every child showed an acute awareness of the different access to these products by class.
  • Again, poor children more often answered that Nescafe is coffee, and Tang is orange juice
  • poorer children were significantly more likely to associate the luxury possessions with happiness than the rich children.
  • What political impact does the spread of transnational culture have on the poor for whom luxury lifestyles are not possible? How do they deal with the daily contradictions that this awareness implies? How much will they accept and how much will they reject? How can they maintain their own identities in the face of transnational culture
  • Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19
     
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