This precisely underlines the glaring imbalance of resources that meat produce demands, while the poor starve for more affordably priced crops that could be otherwise grown in abundance.

While monoculture agriculture 'produces environmental problems by altering the delicate balance of natural eco-systems', vegetarianism does not call for monoculture - as balanced vegetarian diets require various crops.

Due to the meat trade, the above-mentioned 'delicate balance' is already in danger - which is why the Food and Agriculture Organisation's 2006 Livestock's Long Shadow report stated: 'The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.' As such, the livestock industry is already unsustainable.

The letter, '70 per cent of grain in US goes to meat industry' (June 7) by Mr George Jacobs stresses the great inefficient use of resources in animal-breeding as a means to create food. And at the alarming rate which more of the richer nations are increasingly consuming meat, this inefficiency will only worsen if left unchecked.

The current global greed for meat is unprecedented - it is nothing natural; a man-made disaster in the making.

Realistically, any global decrease of meat demand is likely to be gradual - not leading to sudden changes in eco-systems (or economy) - especially when the world's diet goes even greener with advances in research.

In January, Mr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nation's Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change, had already advised the world unequivocally: 'Please eat less meat. This is something that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.'

It is time to heed this urgent message: increased vegetarianism is the more environmentally, and thus, economically sustainable diet in the long run.

I wrote in the letter, 'Vegetarianism can help in food and climate crises' (June 7) that 'the food and climate crises are closely interrelated and solvable, in part, by vegetarianism'.

While vegetarianism may not be the complete solution for the food and climate crises, it is nevertheless important in improving both human and planetary well-being.

Sng See Ann