what do you mean land eating
Answers
Answer:
Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories (as shown in the visualization). This means that what we eat is more important than how much we eat in determining the amount of land required to produce our food. As we get richer, our diets tend to diversify and per capita meat consumption rises; economic development unfortunately exerts an increasing impact on land resources. If we want per capita meat consumption to be able to rise sustainably at lower incomes, per capita meat consumption at high incomes will have to decrease.
This raises an interesting question: if we were to reach a level of sustainable dietary equitability at a global level, what would our diet have to look like? Alexander et al. (2016) attempted to answer this question using a thought experiment, termed the ‘HALF index’ (short for ‘Human Appropriation of Land for Food’).1
The HALF index asks and answers the hypothetical question: if everyone in the world adopted the average diet of country ‘x’, what percentage of the global land area would we need for agriculture?
Alexander et al. (2016) calculate this index based on the combination of UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) national consumption patterns and global average yield and land use intensities for different food commodities. This data is based on FAO data from 2011—the latest year available at the time of the paper’s publication. By combining metrics of dietary composition (for example, the average per capita consumption of beef in the United Kingdom) and the land intensity of beef production (the amount of land required to produce a kilogram of beef based on average global figures), the authors calculated the average amount of land required to supply the diet of an individual in any given country. Note that this measure does not include fish and other seafood products. By multiplying this land requirement per person by the global population, we can make an estimate of the total area (and therefore the share of land area) which would be required if everyone in the world adopted the dietary habits of any given country. The authors define this measure (the share of land area required for agriculture if everyone adopted the diet of country ‘x’), the HALF index.
We have utilized the figures from the HALF index as reported in this paper for the visualizations in this article, with one notable change. Whilst Alexander et al. report this index as the percentage of total global land area, we find it easier to interpret these figures as the percentage of total global habitable land area. With our change, an index value of 100 percent indicates that the global adoption of a given diet would be physically achievable if we used all habitable land area for agriculture and values greater than 100 percent are not viable within global land constraints. We have therefore adapted HALF index figures for habitable land area based on the assumption that 71 percent of global total land area is habitable, as shown in the chart.
Explanation: