Rethinking Food

As the leading international animal welfare environmental charity, we are urging companies to take a holistic system-wide approach accounting for their animal footprint on the climate, nature and health crisis. We are particularly keen to discuss with businesses the integration of measurable targets for the reduction of meat and other livestock products in corporate sustainability plans.

The stability of the planet is in peril. Our food system is failing. Our dependence on intensive animal agriculture has played an outsized role in this failure. In the need to change, food businesses are presented with an incredible opportunity to help set a more sustainable course where people, planet and animals can thrive and live in harmony. Together, we have forged new paths that are set to improve the lives of over two billion animals. We look forward to building on that. The power of our partnership is immense and by setting measurable and meaningful targets to reduce the production and consumption of animal-based products, coupled with investment in higher welfare and regenerative farming practices we can, quite literally, change the world.

Our approach

Compassion is evolving its work programme with food companies to deliver a more resilient and sustainable food system which addresses the needs of people, planet, and animals.

Through extensive stakeholder collaboration, key interventions, and practical tools, we will help your business evaluate its current model, identify priority areas, build the business case for change and set strategies that are fit for the future.

Over time, these strategies will reduce the production and consumption of farmed animals, rebalance the animal protein in your consumer offer and help to regenerate nature and restore biodiversity.

Our team of experts will help you measure progress, deliver higher animal welfare and remain relevant and credible to customers whose attitudes and tastes are changing at pace, thus protecting profitability, market performance and brand reputation.

This is an exciting time for food businesses – for innovation, for investment and for being a part of a transformation towards a ‘planetary resilient’ food system.

Time to act

Humanity poses a threat to the stability of the planet… We need to urgently redefine the food system and start the transformation towards a planetary health diet for all

Professor Johan Rockström, Stockholm Resilience Centre, speaking at EAT and The Rockefeller Foundation’s virtual event, 24 June 2020¹

Scientific research supports the call for urgent fundamental changes in the way we produce and consume food for the sake of our own health, the climate and the environment. We must transform our food system if we are to address the multi-dimensional challenges of producing sufficient, safe and nutritious food for all within the safe operating space of all nine planetary boundaries.²

Credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015.

As of 2015, four of the nine planetary boundaries – climate change, loss of biosphere integrity (biodiversity), land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen particularly from industrial agriculture) – had already been crossed, as a result of human activity.

Without a new food system, we will not be able to address the global health crisis, meet the targets of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, achieve the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity whilst also meeting the needs of a rising population projected to be around 10 billion by 2050.

A clear majority of credible scientific papers – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES), and the EAT-Lancet Commission – conclude that meat and dairy must begin to play a much smaller role in our daily diets.

It would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.

Hans-Otto Pörtner, ecologist, co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Our failing food system

Until now, undernutrition and obesity have been seen as polar opposites of either too few or too many calories. In reality, they are both driven by the same unhealthy, inequitable food systems.

Prof Boyd Swinburn, University of Auckland, Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Obesity³

Despite years of increased investment, research and development and technological advancement, there remain significant failings in our food system.

Right now, more than 820 million people do not have enough to eat, whilst according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) the world wastes approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of edible food every year (FAO, 2016).⁴

What that FAO calculation has not taken into account is the biggest single waste of food: feeding human-edible crops to industrial livestock. Cereals, soya and palm are fed to intensively reared livestock, who convert them inefficiently into meat, milk and eggs. Protein conversion ranges from as low as 4 percent for beef, to 25% for eggs.⁵ In addition, almost a fifth of the world’s total catch of wild fish is processed into fishmeal and fish oil, the majority of which are used to feed farmed fish.⁶ Through this process, enough food to feed four billion people is wasted. Enough to sustain more than half of humanity today.

At the same time two billion men, women and children are overweight or obese⁷, with poor diets being responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor⁸. The overconsumption of meat, dairy and eggs in developed regions exceeds both dietary guidelines and new planetary diet guidelines.

The United Nations in 2016, reported that food production, when not sustainably managed, is a major driver of biodiversity loss and polluter of air, fresh water and oceans, as well as a leading source of soil degradation and greenhouse gas emissions.⁹ The way we produce food also contributes to antimicrobial resistance¹⁰ and non-communicable diseases, as well as emerging and foodborne diseases, and provides poor conditions for workers and vulnerability to price squeeze from input suppliers, processors and retailers. It also delivers poor animal welfare.

The impact of intensive animal farming

The climate, nature and health emergency we face is undoubtedly caused by multiple factors, a major one of which is intensive animal farming.

Issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and public health can be collectively addressed through the elimination of factory farming and the move towards high welfare regenerative farming systems. Continue reading to learn more about the scale of the impact of factory farming.

People

• Unhealthy diets are acknowledged as the largest global cause of disease, with the over-consumption of sugar, salt and saturated fat in highly processed foods, coupled with inadequate consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables. Furthermore, the overconsumption of red and processed meat – only made possible by intensive animal farming – contributes to heart disease, obesity, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.
• An estimated two billion people – around a quarter of the world’s population - suffer from severe or moderate food insecurity.¹¹ despite enough calories being produced to feed more than twice the world’s population.¹²
• Every year there are around 600 million cases of foodborne diseases and 420,000 deaths¹³ predominantly from Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. Coli. In addition, agricultural intensification is associated with 50% of emerging zoonotic diseases since 1940. Zoonotic transmission is responsible for three out of every four new or emerging infectious diseases in humans. SARS, EBOLA, and HIV are linked to the consumption and close contact with the body fluids of wild animals (civets, bats, and primates, respectively).
• Around one-third of the world’s population relies on farming, livestock, forests or fishing for food and income.¹⁴ The livelihoods of many farming communities are adversely affected by intensive animal farming. These include negative impacts on employment as industrial agriculture needs less labour, lack of effective wealth distribution and a reliance on costly inputs.

Click on the tabs below to find out more.

HEALTH FOOD SECURITY

FOOD SAFETY LIVELIHOODS CULTURE

Planet

• Intensive animal farming threatens several planetary boundaries, including climate change, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), land-system change, freshwater use, and the loss of biodiversity. If we are to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, all sectors, including energy and transport, will need to reduce their emissions.
• Intensive livestock production is already responsible for 14.5% of global anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. Under a business as usual model of food production, in which meat and dairy consumption rises in line with a growing global population and rising GDPs, the agriculture sector alone would emit enough greenhouse gasses to take up the entire two degrees Celsius emissions budget by 2050.¹⁵
• A range of studies show that a substantial decrease in the consumption of meat and dairy is urgently needed if the emissions from food and farming are to be reduced below their current levels and that a shift to more plant-based diets is essential if we are to meet the Paris Climate Agreement targets.
• In addition, the intensification of crop production for animal feed has accelerated land and soil degradation – on a business-as-usual model, the UN warns of just sixty years’ productivity left in the world’s soils.
• Around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction¹⁶, with intensive animal production a primary factor.¹⁷ As meat consumption rises, so farmland expands depriving wildlife of their natural habitat and bringing them into dangerously close proximity to human activity providing the perfect opportunity for pathogens to spread, some of which are zoonotic and pose a threat of pandemics.

Click on the tabs below to find out more.

PLANETARY BOUNDARIES CLIMATE CHANGE

BIODIVERSITY LOSS LAND USE WATER USE

Animals

• Industrial livestock production systems have been designed with little thought to the behavioural needs and wants of animals. The resulting systems rely heavily on technology, the prophylactic use of antibiotics to help prevent disease, genetic selection beyond the physiological limits of the animal, and a high-volume, low-margin economic model.
• Intensive systems are largely barren confinement systems, such as cages and crates or highly stocked barns or feedlots, with few provisions for physical comfort or occupation. They frequently deprive animals from the comfort of their own kind, through single penning, and are reliant on routine mutilations to prevent the worse behavioural effects of boredom and frustration such as tail biting and feather pecking. They are usually, but not confined to, large scale operations.
• Globally, more than 77 billion land animals are reared for food each year, with two out of three of those animals reared in intensive systems. Estimates of farmed fish are between 50 and 160 billion.
• While progress is being made towards incremental change such as the removal of cages for hens and sows, and the reduction of high stocking densities for chicken in some parts of the world; a greater degree of intensification is occurring in others.
• Farm animals and fish are sentient beings capable of feeling pain and emotions such as depression or joy. They deserve to lead a good quality of life, one not only free from suffering, but one that provides opportunities for positive experiences such as comfort, pleasure, play; to learn, be confident and have a sense of choice. It is our ethical responsibility and moral imperative in which we all have a part to play.

Click on the tabs below to find out more.

FARMED ANIMALS FARMED FISH

WILD ANIMALS WILD FISH SENTIENCE

Despite the compelling evidence from multiple sectors, there has been limited action to begin to deliver a healthy and sustainable food system. Intensive animal farming continues to consume vast resources, including cereals and soy, to produce animal feed. Forests are destroyed and re-purposed into farmland and the intensification of crop production which, with its use of monocultures and agro-chemicals, has led to overuse and pollution of ground- and surface-water¹⁸, soil degradation^{19, 20}, biodiversity loss²¹, and air pollution²². Policy makers may recognise the serious environmental crises we face but many are reluctant to acknowledge the part played by intensive animal production in generating these crises.

To address this, we need to RETHINK our food system and work collectively and creatively on the transition that will move us all towards a more humane, resilient, and sustainable food system.

The way forward

The EAT-Lancet Commission report (2019) on ‘Food, Planet, Health’ , provided the first full scientific review for a healthy and sustainable diet and detailed the changes necessary to create a sustainable food future. The Commission’s reference diet or planetary health diet, provides a science-based framework for a flexible solution to stay within planetary boundaries, that will feed up to 10 billion people by 2050, limit a global temperature rise to less than two degrees and ensure optimal human health and nutritional guidelines. It also allows for adaptation to dietary needs, personal preferences and cultural traditions.

The planetary health diet is a global reference diet for adults that is symbolically represented by half a plate of fruits and vegetables. The other half consists of primarily whole grains, plant proteins (beans, lentils, pulses, nuts), unsaturated plant oils, modest amounts of meat and dairy, and some added sugars and starchy vegetables.

EAT forum.org²³