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.