This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You)

by Ed Winters

That said, because we don’t want to turn all animal farms into arable farms, and many animal farms are on land that wouldn’t be suitable anyway, we could also use the money to pay farmers to restore, reforest and rewild their farmland. In essence, they would be publicly funded land managers, subsidised by the state, but the commodity they would be providing wouldn’t be food but instead wildflower meadows, forests, woodlands and peatlands. Rather than making a living from killing animals, they would be paid to provide habitats for wildlife and biodiversity – paid to create life, not to take it. There is a precedent for this exact model of land stewardship. In the 1940s, around 75 per cent of Costa Rica was covered in rainforests. However, by the 1970s and 1980s, it had one of the highest rates of deforestation in Latin America, with as much as half of the forest cover being destroyed, primarily for cattle grazing and the production of animal feed. In response to this, the Costa Rican government made deforestation illegal, except for specifically approved reasons. They then introduced the Payments for Environmental Services Program, a subsidy system that paid farmers to protect biodiversity, sequester carbon-dioxide emissions and regrow the lost forests on the grazing lands. Essentially, the government eliminated harmful payments such as cattle subsidies and replaced them with support payments for improving nature. As a result, Costa Rica has become the first tropical countr...