An extra two billion people could be fed every year and land around the size of Mexico would be freed up to grow food for people if we ended the feeding of grain to factory farmed animals, according to a new report released today (16 October) by Compassion in World Farming.

Released on World Food day, the report Food not Feed: How to stop the world’s biggest form of food waste reveals that in the EU, factory farming wastes over twice as much food than the amount wasted in the conventional sense e.g. by being thrown away by households and food businesses.

It explains that feeding human-edible grain to animals to produce meat or dairy is an inefficient way to produce food – for example, for every 100 calories of human-edible grain fed to animals, just 3-25 calories of meat are produced.

If we reduced this inefficiency by switching to regenerative farming, with animals fed on products humans cannot eat – such as pasture, by-products and properly treated unavoidable food waste/scraps – global food security would be vastly improved, the report explains.

Insights from the new calculations in the report show that:

globally, a colossal 766 million tonnes of grain are inefficiently used by being fed to farmed animals - most of whom are factory farmed – more food than is wasted by households (631m tonnes), food service (290m tonnes) or retail (131m tonnes);
almost 15 million hectares of arable land could be released to grow food for people in the EU if the use of grain to feed factory farmed animals was ended, and in the US, more 7 million hectares of land would be released;
while 59 million tonnes of food are thrown away in the EU every year, almost 125 million tonnes of grain are wasted by being fed to animals – enough to feed an extra 247 million people per year;
even more is wasted in the US, where 66 million tonnes of food are thrown away while 160 million tonnes of grain are wasted as animal feed – enough to feed almost 288 million extra people.

Worryingly, it also shows that around double the grain currently used will need to be produced to feed factory farmed animals by 2040 if we continue with business as usual.

Thousands of hectares of land are cleared to grow crops for feeding farmed animals, with deforestation impacting communities and killing nature. Furthermore, industrial agriculture’s huge demand for grain as animal feed has led to an expansion of monocultures, and the use of chemical pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers has led to soil degradation,[1,2] biodiversity loss,[3] overuse and pollution of water,[4] and air pollution.[5]

Peter Stevenson, Chief Policy Advisor at Compassion in World Farming, said:

It is simply scandalous that while hundreds of millions of people go hungry and we face a triple planetary crisis, we are allowing hundreds of millions of tonnes of food to be wasted every year by being fed to factory farmed animals.

As well as being the world’s biggest form of animal cruelty, fuelling climate change and killing nature, factory farming wastes food on a colossal scale, undermining global food security.

Governments worldwide must stop propping up wasteful grain-based factory farming with public money through subsidies and adopt fair policies that prioritise food over feed. If we fed human-edible crops directly to people instead of to animals used to produce meat or dairy, we could feed an astonishing 2 billion extra people every year.

Vinciane Patelou, Head of EU at Compassion in World Farming, said:

As EU policymakers are shaping the next Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), this report shows that prioritising the production of food over feed is paramount to use our natural resources efficiently and ensure the resilience of our food systems.

Alongside the report, the NGO has released a powerful interactive tool to raise awareness of this issue which shows the amount of food inefficiently used across the globe through factory farming in selected key countries.

References

Edmondson et al, 2014. Urban cultivation in allotments maintains soil qualities adversely affected by conventional agriculture. Journal of Applied Ecology 2014, 51, 880–889.
Tsiafouli et al., 2015. Intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity across Europe. Global Change Biology: 21, p973–985.
World Health Organization and Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. 2015. Connecting global priorities: biodiversity and human health.
Mekonnen M and Hoekstra A, 2012. A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animal products. Ecosystems.: DOI: 10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8.
Lelieveld et al, 2015. The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale. Nature, Vol 525.

Feed production: the immense waste behind factory farming revealed