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.
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.
AMSTERDAM - Just 31 of the world’s largest corporations involved in meat, dairy and feed production face up to $5.4 trillion in long-term risks by 2050, with near-term risks reaching $116 billion by 2030, according to a new report released today by Profundo,…
New York – 105 civil society organizations from across the globe have raised concerns with major U.S. banks today, urging them to halt their financing of industrial livestock production. The open letter, delivered to financial giants including Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM),…
Today, the World Bank released a new comprehensive blueprint for addressing the giant climate footprint of our industrial food system.
Studies suggest that cattle ranching and animal feed production is currently responsible for 80% of deforestation across the Latin America and Caribbean region.
As world leaders meet tomorrow in Paris to discuss the role of public finance in addressing “climate change and the global crisis”, delegates should press multilateral development banks (MDBs) to invest in line with the Paris Agreement
Our goal in engaging IFC is to encourage the bank to shift its agricultural lending toward diversified and climate-resilient food systems.