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celebratedrecluse wrote

A growing demand for vegan products would also be devastating for biodiversity because it would rely on monoculture fruit and vegetable crops (particularly soybeans). It would also necessitate expanding arable land by cutting down forests and increase the consumption of water for agriculture. It would also deepen already existing labour exploitation of vulnerable populations and further encourage large landowners and corporations to abuse small-scale farmers.

This is factually untrue, and someone with as little formal education as me is apparently more informed than the author. Most cropland in the author's country is devoted to the cultivation of animals, which necessitate a whole trophic level of magnitude more calories than simply growing vegetables and other plants for human consumption directly. We could easily reduce cropland and cease overfishing in the developed world if the industrial cultivation of animals for consumption was stopped.

I'm not even an idpol/lib vegan, but the argument that promoting vegan lifestyles would necessitate more waste or environmental destruction is a very difficult thing to support, and they didn't provide any citations to support that idea while simultaneously failing to even mention the fundamental principles i referred to. This is like intro-level biology stuff...lol...

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