Droughts: The Slow Violence Starving Millions
We’ve been warned for decades. Now, drought isn’t a distant possibility — it’s here, pushing tens of millions of people towards starvation. And it’s no accident. It’s the direct result of a mindset that treats the Earth as a commodity and life as expendable.
More than 90 million people in eastern and southern Africa alone are on the edge of starvation after record-breaking droughts decimated crops and killed farmed animals. In Somalia, a quarter of the population is now facing starvation. Morocco has endured six consecutive years of drought, leaving the country with a 57% water deficit. Spain’s olive production fell by half, doubling prices. Turkey, stripped of aquifers and scarred by sinkholes, stands as a stark preview of what’s coming for the rest of us.
This isn’t just "bad weather." Mark Svoboda of the US National Drought Mitigation Center calls it a "slow-moving global catastrophe" — the worst he’s ever seen. And he’s right. Drought is a silent killer. It drains resources and lives in slow motion, leaving deep scars. It doesn’t just take food; it takes futures.
Meanwhile, the destruction of the world’s forests has reached record levels. Last year alone, we lost forests the size of Italy, largely due to fires fueled by global heating. In the Amazon, Brazil lost more than 25,000 square kilometres — the worst on record. Bolivia followed close behind, driven by drought, fire, and relentless agricultural expansion for soya, cattle, and sugar cane. The Congo basin rainforest, the planet’s second lung after the Amazon, is bleeding out. The world's leaders promised to halt deforestation by 2030. They’re failing spectacularly.
Yet, we keep missing the root cause: the obsessive expansion of animal agriculture. Raising animals for food is not only responsible for enormous greenhouse gas emissions but devours water, land, and forest at unprecedented scales. Animal farming is the biggest user of agricultural land worldwide — a land grab so extreme that the forests aren’t safe.
The meat and dairy industries know this. They’ve known it since the 1980s. Instead of acting, they’ve weaponised public relations. The beef industry has been quietly rewriting climate science curricula for children, removing any mention of reducing meat consumption. Instead of empowering children with facts, they feed them lies to preserve consumption habits — habits that are literally burning the planet.
Beyond the classrooms, the same industries spread disinformation through podcasts and media influencers. Charismatic hosts frame climate solutions as "government overreach," turning survival into a culture war. Eating less meat — one of the most impactful individual actions to mitigate climate collapse — is dismissed as irrelevant or extremist. Meanwhile, nearly half the global temperature rise since 1750 is attributed to methane, most of it from farmed animals. But the dairy giants? They continue to "turn a blind eye," resisting methane targets, ignoring action plans, and investing more in PR than in actual solutions.
These industries present technical tweaks — feed additives, rotational grazing — as silver bullets. But science is clear: there is no path to climate stability without cutting back animal use. Full stop.
It gets worse. The climate crisis is also expanding the reach of deadly fungal infections. Rising temperatures are enabling dangerous fungi to spread into new territories, threatening both human health and food security. Pathogens like Aspergillus fumigatus and A. flavus are projected to expand massively, exposing millions more to fatal infections. These fungi aren’t just medical threats — they also devastate crops, adding more pressure to already fragile food systems.
All the while, politicians — who could model low-carbon behaviours — choose to hide, fearful of being called hypocrites. They’re terrified to ask people to eat fewer animals, terrified to be seen as "lecturing." So they do nothing, leaving the responsibility with individuals while shielding the true culprits: industries that profit from destruction.
This isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s an injustice. The people most at risk of starvation contributed least to this crisis. They aren’t the ones driving SUVs to luxury supermarkets. They aren’t munching steaks or supporting factory farms. Yet they are paying with their lives.
Meanwhile, women — who consume less red meat on average and emit significantly less carbon — are already leading by example. But individuals alone can’t stop this train wreck. The power to change systems lies with collective action: shifting institutional food policies, transforming supply chains, demanding corporate accountability, and dismantling subsidies that prop up animal agriculture.
This is about rejecting the mindset that sees life as disposable. It's about ending the treatment of living beings — human or non-human — as mere resources to be used, extracted, and discarded. We must abandon the false dichotomy of individual vs. systemic change. We need both, urgently. Stop using animals. Demand that schools, hospitals, and governments do the same. Push companies to stop fuelling this inferno with methane-laden "products." And call out the disinformation wherever it lurks — whether in classrooms, podcasts, or greenwashed corporate reports.
We are not powerless. Our food choices, our voices, our votes — they matter. Droughts, fires, and famine are not acts of nature. They’re the predictable consequences of a system built on domination and exploitation. When water, food, and energy vanish, societies unravel. The world is already on that path.
Millions are starving today not because there isn’t enough food but because of where we direct our resources — towards breeding, feeding, and slaughtering billions of animals instead of feeding humans directly. We can either continue this trajectory or choose a new one rooted in justice, freedom, and respect for all life.
The time to act isn’t "someday." It’s now.