Stopping Factory Farm Finance
Across the globe, industrial livestock operations are a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and land grabbing, biodiversity loss, water depletion and air and water contamination. These negative impacts disproportionately affect women, Indigenous peoples and low-income communities of color. Intensive livestock production also causes tremendous animal suffering and increases the risk of antibiotic resistance and new pandemics.
Despite all this, public development banks (PDBs) including the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and International Finance Corporation (IFC) are using tax dollars to prop up and expand giant meat and dairy companies like Minerva and Smithfield Foods. During the last 10 years alone, the top five development banks poured $4.5 billion into industrial livestock companies in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, China, Vietnam, Madagascar and Kenya, all under the guise of “sustainable development.” In reality, financing industrial-scale meat and dairy operations directly contradicts PDBs’ commitments to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and align their lending with the Paris Climate Agreement.
In late 2021, Friends of the Earth joined together with organizations across the globe to form the Stop Financing Factory Farming (SFFF) campaign. Our mission is simple: bring an end to public financing of cruel and environmentally and socially destructive industrial livestock operations. During the last year, the SFFF campaign has engaged public development banks on loans to the following industrial operations: Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC, animal feed), Marfrig (beef), Mavin (pigs), and Pronaca (pigs and poultry).
As we continue to fight against public financing for specific climate-wrecking animal agribusiness projects, our long term goal is to secure Development Finance Institution (DFI) policies that will exclude financing of industrial livestock operations from their portfolios. To join our efforts and learn more about our campaign, please contact us and check out the resources below.
A letter sent to EPA Administrator Michael Regan urges him to act on the EPA’s existing authority to provide federal oversight of factory farms.
Despite opposition from more than 235 organizations, shareholders have approved a $200M loan to Louis Dreyfus Company Brazil (LDC).
Public development finance should not be channeled to large-scale industrial livestock operations like Marfrig that fuel deforestation and the climate crisis.
Studies suggest that cattle ranching and animal feed production is currently responsible for 80% of deforestation across the Latin America and Caribbean region.
Our goal in engaging IFC is to encourage the bank to shift its agricultural lending toward diversified and climate-resilient food systems.