Industrial animal agriculture is not only the biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet, it also produces more direct greenhouse gas emissions than the direct emissions of all the world’s planes, trains, and cars put together. This makes it a major driver of climate change, and air, soil, water pollution, and biodiversity loss.

Factory farming is too often viewed as the cheap, efficient solution to feeding our world. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. For every 100 food calories of edible crops fed to livestock, we get back just 3-25 calories in the form of meat and dairy. In short, people are being forced to compete with farm animals for food.

Over one million people signed our END.IT petition to call on world leaders to end factory farming for a more sustainable future.

Through our work on the recently launched Good Food for All European Citizen's Initiative (ECI) and the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, we advocate for a fair transition away from factory farming and towards regenerative animal farming methods that respect animals, restore nature and empower people and higher-welfare farmers.

Learn more about the Good Food for All ECI and how you can take action.

Alongside disincentivising factory farming, we also advocate for no expansion of industrial farming into new species, such as the worrying plans of opening the world’s first commercial octopus farm in Spain. To that we say: Keep Them Wild.

LESS, BETTER MEAT AND MORE PLANTS

Nearly 70% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture come from the animal sector, and around 68% of EU agricultural land is used for animal production. As a major cause of climate change and biodiversity loss, action to reduce the environmental impacts of animal agriculture is urgently needed. Over-consumption of animal products is not only linked to numerous diseases - including obesity, heart disease, and some kinds of cancer - it also requires a huge number of animals to be farmed. Due to land restrictions or market pressures, they are most often kept in crowded, stressful conditions, which are a perfect breeding ground for diseases and could even trigger the next pandemic.

In its ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy, the EU Commission recognised that our ‘food consumption patterns are unsustainable’, and that the EU average ‘consumption of whole-grain cereals, fruit and vegetables, legumes and nuts is insufficient.’ We thus call on the EU to put words into action and adopt laws and policies that drive consumption towards less but higher welfare animal products, through demand-side measures such as public campaigns, labelling, and public procurement.