February
2000
World
Bank Versus World Health
By Neal D. Barnard
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The
World Bank has proved again that the pen is indeed mightier than the
sword. The sword—a scythe harvesting the traditional grains that
have kept China free of the heart disease and cancer epidemics plaguing
Western nations—was defeated December 22 1999 by a stroke of the
World Bank’s pen, which signed a $93.5 million check to build 130
feedlots and five processing centers for China’s nascent beef industry.
The World Health Organization would have had it differently. Its figures
show that the traditional Chinese diet, rich in nutrients from rice
and vegetables, with little meat and virtually no dairy products, has
kept Western diseases at arm’s length. An improved food distribution
network has eliminated the shortages that have plagued some other Asian
countries. Per-capita food intake is actually higher than in the U.S.
Unfortunately, Western eating habits had already gained a foothold in
some parts of China without support from the World Bank. Health researchers
from Cornell and Oxford universities, along with the Chinese government,
lamented how fast food, steak, and cheese were starting to replace traditional
rice and noodle dishes. Those Chinese counties with the most aggressive
Westernization of their diets are showing the highest rates of western-style
medical problems.
Ironically, it is just as America is recognizing the need to “Easternize”
its own diet, with rice, soy products, and more and more vegetarian
and vegan options, that World Bank bureaucrats decided to promote a
Westernization of China’s diet. Instead of supporting the use of
grain as a cholesterol-free dietary staple for humans, the myopic enterprise
will feed grain to cattle to produce meat loaded with fat and cholesterol.
From Bank headquarters in Northwest Washington, they will never see
the myocardial infarctions in Beijing, hypertension in Shanghai, or
diabetes in Chungking caused by these eating habits.
It is a model, not just of poor health, but of incredible inefficiency.
Kilo after kilo of grain proteins fed to cattle yield only one-tenth
of their amount of protein as meat—exactly the kind of fiasco Frances
Moore Lappé described in Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, as
President Nixon prepared to visit China. With a burgeoning world population,
she wrote, it is grain and vegetables that will sustain us, and a meat-based
diet that will steal these simple foods to fatten cattle.
In building a network of feedlots, one has to wonder if the World Bankers
even bothered to consider what feedlot runoff does to rivers and streams
in the U.S. Of course, the World Bank’s efforts to help China make
a killing in cattle farming is aimed not at good health or a clean environment,
but at economic investment. No doubt, it will pay off for some cattle
ranchers in China, who will edge out vegetable and rice acreage. And,
almost as if they planned it that way, there will be a bright future
in China’s medical industries. In the decades ahead, as heart attacks
become the order of the day, the World Bank can invest in the Chinese
pharmaceutical industry. It, of course, will have to do battle with
surgical suppliers, to see if the prescription-writing pen is mightier
than the coronary bypass scalpel. The power of a healthful plant-based
diet will have long since been forgotten.
Neal D. Barnard, M.D., is the founder of the Physicians Committee
for Responsible Medicine, and has written five diet-related books, including
Eat Right, Live Longer and Foods That Fight Pain. For information, contact
www.pcrm.org.
This article reprinted with the kind permission of PCRM. A shorter version
of this article appeared in the New York Times (12/24/99).
