A very important issue that needs addressing is Animal Agriculture this is a phenomenon that affects most of us, as most people are meat and dairy eaters and contribute to it by consuming these products.

A multitude of environmental problems our planet faces share a common instigator: animal agriculture and our reliance on meat and dairy products. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), global agriculture accounts for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. A 2006 study by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) finds that 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions is directly attributable to livestock production, which is more than the emissions attributable to the entire transportation sector. The growing demand for animal agriculture is expected to be a major contributor to a roughly 80% increase in global greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector. As more people move into cities and the city lifestyle is very reliant on animal products. This means that animal agriculture must be a central element of our efforts to mitigate climate change.

In addition to being a major contributor to climate change, animal agriculture is also one of the leading causes of many other environmental issues, including overfishing, destruction of wildlife, deforestation, and depletion of freshwater resources to hydrate livestock or irrigate fodder. According the FAO approximately 75% of the world's fisheries are either exploited or depleted due to fishing, which will likely lead to the complete depletion of currently fished fish stocks by 2048.

With regard to deforestation, the World Bank has found that animal agriculture is responsible for roughly 90% of the razing of the Brazilian Amazon. Lastly, but likely most critically, animal agriculture is the number one consumer of fresh water by a significant margin. Animal agriculture consumes on average 55 trillion gallons of water annually. On a micro level, it takes roughly 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1lb. of beef.

Researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria produced a comprehensive assessment of the livestock industry around the world, in developed nations where factory farming is common and in developing nations where livestock are more likely to graze on grasslands. They dug up some striking statistics that underscore just how much meat production varies from region to region.

Each year the livestock sector globally produces 586 million tons of milk, 124 million tons of poultry, 91 million tons of pork, 59 million tons of cattle and buffalo meat, and 11 million tons of meat from sheep and goats. That 285 million tons of meat altogether — or about 36 kg (80 lb.) per person, if it were all divided evenly. It's not — Americans eat 122 kg (270 lb.) of meat a year on average, while Bangladeshis eat 1.8 kg (4 lb)

Of the 95 million tons of beef produced in the world in 2000, the vast majority came from cattle in Latin America, Europe and North America. All of sub-Saharan Africa — a region with nearly three times as many people as the entire U.S. — produced just 3 million tons of beef.

1.3 billion tons of grain are consumed by farm animals each year — and nearly all of it is fed to livestock, mostly pork and poultry, in the developed world and in China and Latin America. All of the livestock in sub-Saharan Africa eat just 50 million tons of grain a year, otherwise subsisting on grasses and on crop residue.

This for me is the most alarming fact, these billions of tons of grains are enough to feed the entire human population and nobody would be hungry, but we feed it to farm animals in order to eat the meat afterwards.

The highest total of livestock-related greenhouse-gas emissions comes from the developing world, which accounts for 75% of the global emissions from cattle and other ruminants and 56% of the global emissions from poultry and pigs.

The most climate-friendly meats comes from pigs and poultry, which account for only 10% of total livestock greenhouse-gas emissions while contributing more than three times as much meat globally as cattle. Pork and poultry are also more efficient for feed, requiring up to five times less feed to produce a kg of protein than a cow, a sheep or a goat.

So what does this all mean? While factory farming in the U.S. gets a lot of criticism for its cruelty, the danger it poses to public health through the overuse of antibiotics and the pollution it causes to air and water, it can be remarkably efficient. And given the fact that the planet isn't getting any bigger while the global population and the global appetite keep growing, efficiency is going to matter when it comes to food production. The upside of inefficient livestock production in the developing world is that there is a lot of room to improve, given the right kind of help — which is exactly what the authors of the PNAS paper are hoping for.

That's not to say it would be advisable simply to export developed-world livestock practices to, say, desperately poor, climatically challenged countries, even if it were possible. Livestock also serves a different function in the developing world. 'Cattle and poultry can be walking banks in the developing world,' says Mario Herrero, an agricultural-systems scientist at CSIRO and a co-author of the paper. 'They provide manure to small-holder farmers. There's a tremendous social role for livestock that can't be ignored.

And the fact that these people live on this industry is very important, as we cannot simply destroy it. More than a billion people would be unemployed.

Above all else, the study underscores that while meat production will need to change in the future, so will meat consumption. It's difficult to get a full and proper accounting of the total environmental impact of livestock production. A 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that livestock were responsible for about 18% of human-caused greenhouse gases — a figure that has been criticized by the meat industry as too high and by some environmentalists as far too low. But what's clear is that American levels of meat consumption can't be sustainably adopted by the rest of the world, even if livestock management becomes more efficient globally. Demand management has to be part of the solution as well, says Herrero. For the environment — and for our hearts and waistlines too.

I recommend to all Ambassadors and people reading this article to go ahead and watch the documentary 'Cowspiracy' available on Netflix, it deals with this issue in more detail and is very educational.

Hyner, C. (2015). A Leading Cause of Everything: One Industry That Is Destroying Our Planet and Our Ability to Thrive on It Georgetown Environmental Law Review. Retrieved April 11, 2017, from https://gelr.org/2015/10/23/a-leading-cause-of-everything-one-industry-that-is-destroying-our-planet-and-our-ability-to-thrive-on-it-georgetown-environmental-law-review/

Walsh, B. (2013). The Triple Whopper Environmental Impact of Global Meat Production. Retrieved April 11, 2017, from http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/

Steinfeld, H. et al. (2006) FAO, Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, available at http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm.

Sergio Margulis, Causes of Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, The World Bank (2004), http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/02/02/000090341_20040202130625/Rendered/PDF/277150PAPER0wbwp0no1022.pdf.