Factory Farming is Leading Driver of Food Waste – Banks are Critical to Address It, New Report Finds
The new report Food Not Feed: How to Stop the World’s Biggest Form of Food Waste exposes the staggering inefficiency of factory farming to feed the world, and the level of global food waste and environmental degradation that comes with it.
The study by Compassion in World Farming reveals that 766 million tonnes of grain - nearly half of all grain grown globally - is fed to animals every year, even though livestock convert these crops extremely inefficiently into meat, milk, or eggs.
For every 100 calories of grain fed to animals, as few as 3–25 calories reach people through meat. If this inefficient “feed-to-meat” system ended, the report estimates that an additional 2 billion people could be fed annually.
‘This is inefficiency on a grand scale. It’s as if for every 100 new homes that are built, some 70 are immediately bulldozed.’
If we stopped feeding grain to factory farmed animals, two billion more people could be fed every year, and if factory farming were to end, farmland almost equalling the size of Mexico could be freed up.
This is not just a waste of these crops, but of the scarce land, water, and energy used to produce them.
Banks are a Critical Policy Lever
Requiring banks to stop funding industrial livestock production is identified as a critical policy proposal to address the issues highlighted in the report:
“Commercial banks, MDBs, and asset managers must stop funding and investing in livestock producers and ancillary businesses (such as feed mills) that use grain and soy as feed.”
CIWF also calls for urgent policy action to end subsidies for grain and soy animal feed, shift public procurement toward plant-rich diets, and stop other financial institutions from funding industrial livestock production.
The organisation argues that tackling this issue is essential to boost food security, meet climate goals, and restore ecosystems.
The report concludes that the world must move rapidly from feeding animals to feeding people - prioritising “food, not feed” to build a fairer, more sustainable global food system.
You can make a difference
Banks use customer deposits to finance their loans – that means they may be using your money to destroy our precious planet. However, that means you have power to drive change as a critical stakeholder.
You can easily check your bank's involvement in factory farming at bankfornature.org, and send them a strong message to cease their financing of the sector or move your money to a better bank.
With many others using our tool, this is a powerful way to drastically reduce the financing provided to factory farming.