Many of the US’ biggest fast-food chains still use caged pigs for pork and have made no commitments to end the practice, according to a new report.

If you thought your Black Forest Ham sandwich at Subway was ethically sourced, I’ve got some bad news for you. Same story if you had a similar thought about your sausage, egg and cheese biscuit at Chick-fil-A.

These restaurants, among 11 other fast-food chains in the US, still use caged pigs for their pork, according to an investigation by the non-profit Animal Equality. While some companies have progressed their efforts to end caged farming, others are lagging behind, with no such commitments outlined or having walked back on previously announced targets.

This includes KFC, Subway, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, Papa John’s, Denny’s, BJ’s Restaurants, Dunkin’ Brands, Sonic, Texas Roadhouse, Red Robin, Qdoba, and First Watch. These chains source their pork products from pigs that have been confined in gestation crates for all or part of their pregnancies, despite the practice now being illegal in 11 states.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Shake Shack, The Cheesecake Factory, and Wendy’s have all made progress towards eliminating the practice, while Chipotle has done so entirely. “Companies like McDonald’s, Chipotle and The Cheesecake Factory are proving the restaurant industry does not need to cage innocent pregnant pigs,” said Animal Equality president Sharon Núñez.

“There is no excuse for this kind of abuse, especially when the majority of Americans are asking for more animal protection,” she added.

Fast-food chains’ lack of cage-free commitments

Gestation crates are metal pens that pigs are moved to shortly after they’re impregnated. These typically measure 2ft wide and 7ft long – only slightly larger than the pig’s body. This means the sows can only take one step forward or backwards, and can’t extend their limbs. The floor underneath is slatted, allowing for urine and excrement to fall into an underlying pit.

In the US, around 60% of pigs are confined to crates for their entire pregnancy (which lasts around 114 days) – in fact, they spend nearly three-quarters (74%) of their lives in confinement. “Gestation crates for pigs are a real problem,” animal scientist Temple Grandin has previously said. “Basically, you’re asking a sow to live in an airline seat.”

Keeping pigs in cages restricts their movement, leading to decreased cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength and bone density, and higher rates of calluses and limb injuries. The crate itself can cause lesions and sores on the pig’s skin, which worsen during the course of the pregnancy. Caged pigs suffer from more urinary tract infections as well, while increased stress levels can extend to piglets’ health and cause compromised immune systems after birth.

These effects have become a major ESG risk factor, but the aforementioned food companies continue to use pork sourced from caged pigs. What’s worse is that they are lacking in commitments to move away from this practice, too. For example, BJ’s Restaurants, Chick-fil-A, First Watch and Texas Roadhouse have made no public pledges to do so.

Others have made commitments before, but later backtracked from these policies. This includes Dunkin’, Sonic (both now owned by Inspire Brands), Denny’s, Papa Johns, Qdoba, Red Robin, and Subway – all these companies had publicly announced their goals between 2009 and 2012.

Meanwhile, Yum Brands – the parent company of KFC and Taco Bell – has said it will publish a policy on caged farming in September this year, and noted that it will establish benchmarks for moving pigs from gestation cages to group housing.

Public and legislative support for animal welfare

The investigation has already made waves in the fast-food industry, with Denny’s facing pressure to end its use of cages. Its shareholder meeting earlier this month had faced a vote to adopt such a policy, after a proposal by the Humane Society of the United States. But in its proxy filing to shareholders a month earlier, its board recommended a vote against the move, saying: “Unfortunately, the pork supply industry has not evolved as expected.”

Denny’s told Reuters that reducing gestation crates is a “complex challenge within our industry”, but acknowledged “the importance of progressing towards more humane practices”. Following the HSUS proposal, Denny’s amended its website language to claim that half of its pork could come from suppliers that limit gestation crates by 2028 – this was said to be a third of its supply in 2022.

“We will continue to speak up for animals and consumers concerned for their wellbeing until Denny’s does what is right and ends this practice,” said Núñez.

In the US, 98% of all pigs are factory-farmed (totalling 71 million). This type of intensive farming can lead to diseases in the animals, which can transfer to humans who consume them. Recently, fears of African swine fever have escalated globally – in Italy, tens of thousands of pigs were culled last year after an outbreak.

Apart from the welfare and health aspects, pig production and factory farming are also highly detrimental to the environment. Swine alone make up 9% of agricultural emissions in the US, according to one estimate. Factory farming, meanwhile, is responsible for 13% of the country’s methane emissions – a gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon.

This is why some states have outlawed the confinement of pigs in gestation crates. Florida – which recently banned cultivated meat – was the first to do so in 2008. Since then, Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Utah have all followed suit.

However, some of these legislations are at risk. California and Massachusetts’ regulations are being challenged in the upcoming Eats Act, a farm bill that could limit states’ ability to regulate agricultural products coming into their borders. It has been described by non-profit Food & Water Watch as “lawmakers’ big gift to Big Ag”.

“This legislation is an opportunity to improve the lives of farmed animals, not dismantle decades of work done to protect them from the cruellest practices in factory farming,” said Maggie Marshall, Animal Equality’s legal advocacy counsel, adding that the bill “puts the wellbeing of animals at risk”.

Voters have demonstrated strong opposition to caged farming. In California, 82% of residents support the state’s cage-free legislation. And a 2018 survey by World Animal Protection found that 80% of Americans were concerned about the treatment of factory-farmed pigs.

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Israeli startup PoLoPo has filed for USDA approval of its molecular farming platform, which genetically engineers potatoes to produce egg proteins within the plant.

PoLoPo is pursuing regulatory approval in the US for its molecular farming technology, which transforms potatoes into egg-protein-producing factories.

Its application for Regulatory Status Review (RSR) to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Inspection Service (APHIS) marks the first step of the regulatory ladder for its SuperAA platform. This is expected within six months, and will establish that PoLoPo’s tech poses no agricultural or pest risk compared to conventional potato cultivation.

Following the greenlight from the APHIS, the startup would be able to pursue commercial plans to grow its transgenic potato plants in the US via partners and local growers. It would also need to engage with the FDA as the next step towards commercialisation.

The company says it’s the first Israeli molecular farming player to seek US approval. Asked why it chose to launch here, PoLoPo co-founder and CEO Maya Sapir-Mir told Green Queen: “Although our product does not contain any DNA, GMO-based technology and production (growth of transgenic plants) are still an issue in most geographies. The US is the most suitable market in terms of regulation and customer acceptance for GMO-based products, so we are starting there.”

She added that the country’s potato growing and starch processing industry is big too, and the startup intends to use existing infrastructure for production.

An egg protein suitable for alt-meat, desserts and snacks

Founded in 2022, PoLoPo’s Super AA platform grows target amino acids within a potato’s tuber, which are harvested when they reach sufficient size. The protein is then extracted and dried into a powder that can be integrated into existing food processing lines and formulations.

Currently deployed at greenhouse scale, the technology can generate patatin (a group of native proteins found in potatoes) and ovalbumin (the major protein found in eggs) through proprietary metabolic engineering techniques. It inserts a DNA sequence into the potato to teach it to produce an egg protein that’s fully functional, and nutritionally and chemically identical to chicken eggs. While this means there’s no animal input and the egg proteins are – by definition – vegan, they’re not suitable for people with egg allergies.

According to PoLoPo, the product has undergone rigorous testing and meets all the necessary food safety standards, deeming it safe for consumption after quality control assessments. USDA approval would set it on the path to actually sell the product to manufacturers, who can use the ovalbumin powder in baked goods, desserts, snacks, meat and meat alternatives, and ice cream.

The highly functional protein can also be used for stabilisation, increasing the nutritional value, and prolonging the shelf life of CPG products. “Our first RSR is for the SuperAA platform itself and not for a specific protein. This step is crucial, as the SuperAA will be the background variety for all our future commercial varieties (for producing different target proteins),” explained Sapir-Mir.

“Once we obtain this approval, we can relatively quickly approve every variety expressing any target protein that we will commercialise (starting with ovalbumin).”

PoLoPo targets 2026 launch via B2B partners

PoLoPo operates as a B2B ingredient provider, instead of selling its own end products on the market. Sapir-Mir did not disclose whether the startup has signed any agreements with manufacturers, but she outlined that B2C is outside its scope currently, and its ingredient fits perfectly into a B2B model.

“The food industry already uses egg proteins in powder, so working with our functional protein powder will be almost straightforward. Moreover, we want to improve the global food production system as much as we can and make it much more sustainable,” she said. “Therefore, the B2B model is the way to go, allowing for a wide range of possibilities and potential impacts.”

PoLoPo closed a $2.3M pre-seed funding round at the end of 2022, and it’s now raising capital again. “This is the right time for PoLoPo to give another boost in R&D and commercial aspects,” said Sapir-Mir. “We are keen to work with strategic investors, from potato growers to potato processors and ingredient providers.”

It’s targeting a market that is inundated with volatile, unpredictable prices and supply shocks due to frequent avian flu outbreaks. It’s also addressing the cruelty issue – in the US, most (if not all) egg-laying hens are part of concentrated animal feeding operations.

Sapir-Mir is targeting 2026 for the rollout of the first products using PoLoPo’s ovalbumin, via collaborations with CPG companies and foodservice chains. Asked if it had global ambitions, she said the current focus is in the US, a huge market with a ton of opportunities. “Nevertheless, we are keen to see other parts of the world that will understand the opportunity to feed the growing population by using GMO methods, and hope to grow our potatoes in more parts of the world.”

Molecular farming is emerging as one of the next frontiers of alternative protein, thanks to its ability to scale up fast and keep costs down compared to animal cell cultivation or precision fermentation – this is made possible by the use of plants to produce ingredients, instead of expensive bioreactors.

Alpine Bio (formerly Nobell Foods), Mozza, Miruku, Finally Foods and Moolec are all using the tech to develop various ingredients through plants. The latter is publicly listed on the Nasdaq and is one of the industry’s leaders. Last month, it received APHIS approval for Piggy Sooy, which are soybeans containing pork proteins.

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Food and climate journalist Thin Lei Win speaks to Ian Urbina, executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, about the organisation’s investigation into India’s shrimp farming industry.

On March 20, The Outlaw Ocean Project, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit investigative outfit that focuses on wrongdoings in the oceans, published a bombshell investigation based on a treasure trove of internal company documents, emails, and WhatsApp messages, as well as footage from security cameras at a shrimp processing plant in India. 

The evidence, provided by a courageous whistleblower, showed multiple levels of wrongdoing, from the terrible living and working conditions the workers had to endure to falsifying documents to say they source shrimp for certified farms and knowingly shipping contaminated products.  

The plant was leased by Choice Canning, a company whose exports have “filled frozen food sections at stores such as Walmart, Price Chopper, ShopRite and Hannaford with a little over 19 million pounds of packaged shrimp”. 

The company’s “Tastee Choice” brand products are sold in commissaries at 29 U.S. Military bases spanning 23 states across the country and Washington, D.C., said the Outlaw Ocean Project, so this isn’t exactly a no-name company. 

On the same day, Associated Press published an article and video news story about the gruelling conditions in Indian shrimp industry, confirming the findings of a report – Hidden Harvest – from the Chicago-based Corporate Accountability Lab, a human rights legal group, that came out a day earlier. 

I reached out to Ian Urbina, executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, and someone I’d interviewed before on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing for The Index podcast over a year ago, to find out about this latest investigation, titled, “India Shrimp: A Growing Goliath”. 

The conversation below has been edited lightly for length and clarity. 

Q: Can we perhaps start from the beginning? How did the story come about and what the findings are, for those who may not have read it? 

A: It emerged in a kind of funny way. An individual who was working at a large seafood company was in the room during several fairly tense meetings we had with that company about findings of forced labour in their plants in China. He left that company and took what looked like a dream job for him in India to run a new plant. 

Several months into that new job, he sent me a note on LinkedIn and said, “You don’t know me but I know you. I came to really respect the work you guys do. I am at a plant where I’m seeing things that are disturbing and probably illegal and I’m not sure what to do.” 

I was on a ship at that time in the Southern Ocean, so I got on the phone and talked with Josh Farinella, the whistleblower and I spent the next week or so vetting him. I really checked him out to make sure he wasn’t fake and was honest, and the more I talked to him by text and by satellite phone from the ship, the more I realised this was an unusually strong whistleblower because he had access to large amounts of very compelling documents. And those documents could make this a stronger revelation. 

That’s always the key thing with whistleblowers – how can you corroborate what they’re saying? He also just kind of checked out in the subtle ways in which reporters check on the credibility of sources. His stories didn’t wobble. Details didn’t shift. 

We were supposed to be at sea for a month and we cut that short and. My visa to India wasn’t approved but my videographer got his. So we sent him in to go meet the whistleblower at the plant, to film conditions, and to get the documents in person. Meanwhile, we were digitally receiving thousands of pages of emails and recordings and all sorts of evidence. 

The outcomes of the investigation is that a plant in India that was operated under a lease by an American company called Choice Canning, which is a large player in the shrimp export arena – over a third of all shrimp in the US is coming from India – had very serious problems with what seemed to be captive labour and also food safety concerns specifically tied to antibiotics in shrimp that seem to have ultimately been shipped to the US and Canada and elsewhere.

Q: There were so many levels of wrongdoing – the forced labour aspect, the hygiene and food safety issues, the antibiotics issues, just to name a few – that it was quite staggering. Is it something that you see quite regularly when it comes to problems with seafood supply chains? 

A: You summed it up well. If you imagine it as layers, you’ve got the layers of, generally speaking, the treatment of workers and you’ve got lots of parts in there, their wages, their living conditions, their work hours, their hygienic expectations. Even within wages, you have delay of wages, non-payment of wages, lots of layers in the labour-human rights category. There are captivity concerns – they are not allowed to leave without permission. 

Then you have the food concerns – the antibiotics, the unhygienic stuff. Is the stuff clean, does it have things in it that it shouldn’t have? 

But then you have the more boring and I think in some ways, more consequential and fundamental problems, which are auditing and tracking. Because there’s an industry that’s supposedly meant to police those other things, right and that whole industry does not work, and often is worse than ineffective. It’s actually complicit in the deception of the consumer and the companies. And that was the case here where there was evidence of wilful deception by the company and the auditing firms. 

And that to me is the the deepest layer because it’s one that traverses India, it takes you to China and takes you to other industries, like garment in Bangladesh, and the auditing and check mechanisms that are meant to reassure companies and consumers even when they’re trying to do well, is pretty ineffective and oftentimes, they’re more just trying to do PR. So I think that’s the deepest layer of problem that we unveiled.

Q: What’s the response been so far? Lots of media have picked it up but there’s also been a Senate committee or political players actually trying to find out what happened, right?

A: Yeah, so I put the “what happened next” in three categories. 

One is… to be fair and balanced, there’s the Indian pushback. Just to be a good reporter, let’s just deliver what they say, whether we believe it or not. That “This is a liberal Western competitively-motivated campaign to undercut a growing Indian industry, and it’s attempting to tarnish our reputation with false claims because the US shrimp industry, the domestic industry is not competitive, and it’s clawing its way back into the market”. 

The liberal cabal card has also been put forward by the company itself and by the industry association and by the government, which is to say, these human rights organisations and these liberal journalists are just out to have a good story and claim terrible things that aren’t there. That’s one form of pushback. It’s completely wrong, but it’s worth giving them their chance. 

The second category is a lot of other news outlets picked up the story and ran with it and amplified it. Great.

And then the third is various stakeholders. I would divide them into lawmakers and executive branch folks. The lawmakers… several congressional offices have asked for the documents. Maybe they just were riding the media wave but don’t have any real intention. But they asked me and they asked the whistleblower and his lawyer for all the documents and they’re going through them. Whether that will result in legislation, a hearing, a letter, who knows? 

The second category outside the congressional or lawmaker realm is the executive branch. A formal whistleblower complaint was submitted by the lawyer of the whistleblower to multiple agencies, the FDA, Customs and Border, Department of Labour, and Department of State. These whistleblower complaints emphasise different parts. So we’ll see. 

But those are the three big impacts. I will point out though, that strategically, the company on the chess board played a very smart move which was probably what they should have done at the outset rather than threatening us and trying to intimidate us with legal letters. They instead, in stage two, went for, “We’re closing this plant, and we’re opening a new one and everything’s going to be great there”. That’s the logical PR move. 

(Thin: you can see at least one letter threatening lawsuit here.)

Q: So the company’s move – that they’re shutting this plant down and opening a new one. It feels a little bit like “Whack-a-Mole”. Labour exploitation and problems within the seafood industry is is not new, right? Because it happened in Thailand years ago with the Burmese workers. It moved to India and now it’s shifting from one place in India to another place in India. Is that just the modus operandi?

A: I mean, I think it’s an even bigger story about how foreign capital operates, if you want to go meta. I think foreign capital just moves when things get hot, whether it’s environmental issues or killing people. In the Amazon logging, it’s the same story. Investors move. 

But yes, I think the hope here, though, journalistically, is that when you engage in the “Whack-a-Mole” journalism that we’re engaged in, if you can whack big – I don’t know how to keep the metaphor – but if you can do it the right way, you get deep enough that big brands start asking hard questions of those no-name players like the auditing firms. 

That you’re doing a follow up story is gold. This is where change happens when folks do stories a month and a half later because you extend its duration the news. And that’s how auditors and big brands started saying, “Hey, we’ve got to fix this for real”. It doesn’t solve it but it could well improve it because they’re more sceptical and asking better questions of their auditors or maybe switching to different kinds of auditors. Whatever.

Q: What about in terms of from consumers, the ordinary people who enjoy having shrimp at a cheap price? Do you think there’s a common misunderstanding around where seafood comes from or is it just easier not to look too closely? 

A: Look, I don’t think the story here is different for Nike shoes or iPhones or shrimp. I do think globalised supply chains are all rife with hidden deficiencies, buried costs, environmental degradation, and slavery. Those are efficiencies and they’re in all the products. 

I think seafood is distinct though. That’s why I left the Times and doubled down on the ocean space because what’s happening out there is different than a sweatshop in Port-au-Prince or Dhaka or the Amazon. 

There are sweatshops on the ships and those supply chains are longer, more tangled, more opaque, and therefore there’s a lot more craziness built into the supply chains and I think on the receiving end, the brands have, for a long time, enjoyed the plausible deniability that allows them to not get a lot of attention because (the oceans are) a hard place to report from. 

It’s hard to break these stories, it’s costly, it’s slow, it’s complicated with the trade data, etcetera. So I think all that has added up to seafood being a good decade behind garments or blood diamonds, like the fluency of average consumers who are like, “Before I get that fur or that diamond, I might want to check to make sure it’s not coming from DRC”. Whereas with secret, it’s only starting to occur like, “Oh, wait, did you see that story?”

Q: Yeah, like with the salmon farms. Now, was this a collaboration, meaning did you collaborate with a lot of media outlets to push the story out? Or was it mainly an Outlaw Ocean Project thing? 

A: China was much more sprawling and more complicated in the collaboration. This was a bit more like Libya in that a collaboration was we did all the reporting, storytelling, video making, etc. And the collaboration that emerged was in the form of convincing editors to run it and that was not an easy sell because of those threatening letters. We had a lot of folks pull out when they saw the letters.

So the collaboration was in distribution more than in reporting although after we reported, we reached out and said, “This whistleblower did something very brave. He probably tanked this career. He’s a working class guy who doesn’t have a whole lot of options. And we as journalists really need to like rally around him. He’s the real deal. The documents in there. Vet it yourself, but I need other journalists to step up.”

So I tried to put the word out to folks and I said, “I need everyone to interview this guy because we need to flash mob around him.” But yeah, folks stepped up and said, “I get it, we’ll interview him and we’ll like put our own thing out.”

Q: Speaking of which, where is Joshua Farinella now? Is he ok?

A: Yeah, he’s great. It’s good. You never know how that’s gonna play out. He gave up a job and took a new job, for, I think a third of what he was making. He moved his family, his wife, his stepdaughter. He’s employed. He signed his contract the day before the story dropped. His lawyer and I were sweating. 

He’s in good shape. He’s happy and very proud of what he did, which is great.

Q: Can anything be done realistically to tackle these issues in a more system systematic way? Or will it always be a reactive thing where we respond to bad behaviour? 

A: I will answer this as a journalist to another journalist, two people who view the world through the lens of journalists can change the world kind of thinking. I do believe that. 

I think that journalism has a huge role to play here in the sense that if we as a group stay on this and keep pressing the core issues of unannounced spot checks versus announced spot checks, big difference. Audits in this form by these kinds of firms that are paid by the very people they’re policing, that’s a worrisome thing, etc, etc. 

If we keep pushing that type of story in this industry or others, I’m pretty sure… and we are smarter than historically journalists have been about working with NGOs who can push other levers.

It doesn’t mean we crossed that advocacy line, but it does mean we say, “You guys should sue. You guys should do as a shareholder resolution. You guys should run follow up coverage. You guys should write consumer letters. You Mr. Lawmaker should have a hearing.” 

If everyone does those things, trust me, this won’t happen.

This is an edited and web-adapted version of the May 10, 2023 edition of the Thin Ink newsletter, a weekly publication on food, climate, and where they meet by journalist Thin Lei Win – subscribe here.

The post Uncovering the Ugly Truth Behind India’s Shrimp Farming Industry appeared first on Green Queen.

Taiwanese hospitality chain Silks Hotel Group has pledged to transition to cage-free eggs across all its sites by 2030, following a partnership with the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan.

Silks Hotel Group, the largest publicly-listed hotel group in Taiwan, has introduced a 100% cage-free egg sourcing policy, which is set to come into effect at all its locations by 2030.

The announcement comes as part of a partnership with animal rights charity the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) and the Taiwan Mennonite New Dawn Educare Center for people with disabilities, which is centred on promoting sustainable practices in the country’s agriculture sector.

As part of Silks Hotel Group’s corporate social responsibility efforts, all restaurants in the luxury chain Regent Taipei will transition to using only cage-free eggs by the end of 2026, with implementation beginning this year.

The decision to do so was born out of a chance meeting between Silks Hotel Group COO Simon Wu and EAST deputy CEO Chen Yumin in December, where they discussed sustainability-related topics. Wu then assigned sustainability director Sharon Liao to carry the conversation forward, which resulted in the cage-free policy.

Why Silks Hotel Group decided to go cage-free

In Taiwan, 70% of egg-laying hens are confined in battery cages throughout their lives. This prevents them from exhibiting their natural behaviours, leading to physical and mental health issues. Keeping hens in these cages subjects them to respiratory, digestive, immune system and skeletal problems – and, to tackle these issues and avoid economic losses, prophylactic antibiotics are routinely administered in their feed.

This means hens struggle to adapt to climatic changes and disease threats, leading to mass culling due to illness and weakness. That puts Taiwan at risk of prolonged egg shortages, as well as the spread of zoonotic diseases that affect both humans and animals. Avian flu is an ever-growing problem globally, recently being detected in cattle in the US too.

This is why Regent Taipei began using free-range eggs from a nearby farm where hens are cared for by employees living with disabilities. The hotel plans to implement this next at its Gallery Lounge and the Robin’s Steakhouse and Teppanyaki, and estimates total annual consumption of 52,000 kgs across all its restaurants.

But does Silks Hotel Group have transparency and certification checks in place? “As a first step, Regent Taipei’s specialty restaurants are sourcing eggs from farms that have achieved EAST Certified certification,” Wu told Green Queen.

“This means that the farms that supply our eggs are subject to strict annual and unannounced audits by EAST to ensure they adhere to comprehensive, evidence-based animal welfare standards and we can be confident that animals in their care are able to exhibit their natural behaviours,” he added.

Calls for better cage-free policies in Taiwan

Cage-free eggs have been a topic of discussion in the Taiwanese government ever since a report by the Open Wing Alliance (OWA) in February, which evaluated policy frameworks around this subject. Of the 17 Asia-Pacific countries analysed, Taiwan ranked sixth, scoring 29 out of a possible 140 points on three pillars: the use of cages, policy frameworks, and welfare standards.

It prompted a group of lawmakers from across party lines to call for accelerated efforts to phase out battery cages and build better environments for egg-laying hens, in a press conference co-hosted with EAST, which is a member of the OWA.

The report said Taiwan met six of 11 established on-farm welfare criteria, and is the only East Asian country with both publicly documented enforcement procedures and financial penalties for violators. Its labelling requirements have legal force, with fines of between NT$30,000 and NT$3M ($950-$95,000). And, in 2019, the nation’s Food and Drug Administration launched a special operation to investigate the coherence between egg labelling and official laying hen welfare standards.

“We applaud Silks Hotel Group for making a commitment to eliminate the cruel confinement of egg-laying hens in its supply chains,” Noa Limpoco, senior Asia lead at the OWA, told Green Queen. “As a leading hotel management company in Asia and the most profitable group on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, it is encouraging to see Silks Hotel Group align with consumer and investor expectations by embracing ethical supply chain practices and ESG principles.”

Upon announcing the cage-free policy, Silks Hotel Group emphasised its commitment to sustainability and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. A key tenet of such aims is a shift away from animal products altogether, considering that livestock farming alone emits up to 20% of the world’s greenhouse gases.

“As our hotels are hosting international travellers from all over the world, we will still need to prepare food with great varieties to cater [to] our guests,” Wu said when asked if the hotel operator had any plans to cut back on meat or dairy in its offerings.

“However, at the same time, we will be offering more diverse vegetarian cuisines as well as increasing our percentage of using animal-friendly food sources,” he added. For example, in February 2023, the hotel company partnered with Michelin Green Star eatery Little Tree Food to launch a Plant-Based Cuisine venture, with the aim of providing guests with “even more healthy and sustainable meal options”.

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Dr Sarah Ison, head of research at animal advocacy group Compassion in World Farming, makes her case for why simply moving to lower-emitting animals isn’t the climate solution we need from our food system.

In recent years, the agriculture industry has been pushing the ‘sustainable intensification’ of livestock farming to justify the continuous production of high volumes of meat and dairy while meeting self-determined climate targets.

However, this ‘intensification’ – which involves increasing the number of animals farmed and rearing them in closer confinement – will not only cause more animal suffering, it also fails to address many of the environmental problems caused by intensive animal farming such as deforestation and wildlife loss. 

A recent Harvard University report, Options for a Paris-Compliant Livestock Sector, shows that an overwhelming proportion of the world’s leading climate, food and agriculture scientists do not see intensification as a solution to tackling the climate crisis.  

Published last month, the survey asked more than 210 world-renowned scientists for their view on the role of the livestock sector in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Almost 80% agreed that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock sector in high-income countries should not be achieved at the cost of animal welfare. The majority indicated little to no contribution of intensification, characterised by “increasing stocking rates of animals, including more animals per shed, or more animals per unit of production”. 

Instead, experts ranked reducing the consumption of animal products (90%) and reducing the number of animals (87%) as actions with the biggest contribution. The largest proportion of experts agreed that efforts to reduce emissions from the livestock sector should not result in an increased number of farmed animals – yet this is what would happen if cattle were replaced with chicken and fish.

Crucially, these were not just any scientists. They were the scientists who have contributed to major climate and agriculture reports, including those from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UNEP and the FAO. They’re the experts who provide the guidance and evidence base for policymakers to decide what’s needed to stay within planetary boundaries, and safeguard public health and the welfare of billions of animals.

Nothing but a purposeful distraction

The consensus of the experts in this Harvard study to reject intensification and consider animal welfare is reassuring. The ‘sustainable intensification’ option is a purposeful distraction and is simply inadequate as it fails to tackle so many other environmental and health problems that confining animals in small spaces creates. These include the increased risk of the emergence of viruses like influenza-A (swine and bird flu), its contribution to antibiotic resistance in people, as well as wildlife loss and deforestation for land used to produce animal feeds. 

Almost all of the experts (92%) agreed that reducing emissions from the livestock sector is important to limiting temperatures to a maximum of 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

The FAO’s Global Roadmap, launched during COP28, contains 10 clear actions on healthy diets, starting with improving dietary guidelines to include environmental considerations. These actions will no doubt improve the emissions reduction potential of changing diets than what is currently in the FAO’s Pathways to Lower Emissions report released earlier. This report, as it stands, is unambitious and based on dietary guidelines that lack consideration for environmental sustainability.

Another action outlined in the roadmap is to move from higher- to lower-emitting animals, meaning from cattle to chickens or fish. While this might seem useful in the short term, more focus must be given to changing diets. Increasing the total number of sentient beings – particularly chickens, pigs and fish who endure the greatest suffering on factory farms – must be avoided.

The climate fight needs a radical transformation

The UNEP’s new Frontiers report, What’s Cooking?, gives a clear indication of the potential benefits of novel alternatives to conventional animal products, including alleviating the suffering of billions of sentient animals in cages and confinement on factory farms. These alternative proteins must be encouraged in favour of intensification and increasing the number of animals if we are to truly transform our food system for the long-term benefit of us all.

At COP28, a declaration was also launched on sustainable agriculture, resilient food systems, and climate action. It now has the support of 159 countries, and over 200 Non-State Actors (including farmers and fishers, businesses, cities, civil society, consumers and all those engaged in food systems) – who signed a call to action for food systems transformation. And, for the first time at the conference, a whole thematic day was dedicated to food, agriculture and water.

While momentum towards action is building, it is needed now to tackle the climate crisis. The approach that not only helps tackle the climate crisis, but also improves human, animal and planetary health, is phasing out factory farming and moving to high welfare, regenerative, nature-positive farming alongside innovative alternatives to conventional animal products. This would improve animal health, reduce the risk of diseases that harm both animals and people, help preserve antibiotics for human use, and substantially decrease biodiversity loss as well as deforestation.

Only a holistic and radical transformation will be enough to tackle the climate issue and secure a healthy future for all, before it’s too late.  

The post Op-Ed: Increasing Animal Cruelty is Not the Answer to Climate Change appeared first on Green Queen.

Apple has stopped production of FineWoven, its eco-friendly alternative to leather for iPhone and Apple Watch cases, after complaints about its performance and durability.

“Goodbye Leather.” This was Apple’s message in a short new ad released last week. The tech giant was promoting its move to ditch the material from its entire product line.

But there was one glaring omission. The ad made no mention of FineWoven, Apple’s first innovation designed to replace leather. You’d think a commercial about scrapping leather would promote an alternative material the company was actively selling.

That’s the thing, though: it doesn’t feel like it’ll be selling it much longer, with the Cupertino-based firm reportedly halting production of FineWoven cases for its phones, watches and accessories, after months of incriminating reviews from dissatisfied customers.

Cardboard-like material with ‘insulting’ price

The tech leader had announced the FineWoven cases at its September event (headlined by the iPhone 15 launch), as part of its efforts to become carbon-neutral by 2030. “Leather is a popular material for accessories, but it has a significant carbon footprint, especially at Apple scale,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of environment, policy and social initiatives, said at the virtual event. “To reduce our impact, we will no longer use leather in any new Apple products, including watchbands.”

FineWoven was described as a microtwill fabric with a suede-like texture and “significantly lower emissions” than leather. It was made from 68% post-consumer recycled content, though it isn’t clear how much of that was bio-based, and if there’s any plastic involved.

The move signposted Apple’s strategy for the post-leather landscape, with the company hoping to meet its climate goals alongside some financial gains. But on Sunday, Twitter/X user and known Apple leaker Kosutami posted an update on the new eco-friendly material. “FineWoven is gone. Since its durability were bad [sic],” they wrote.

“All the production line was stopped and removed. Apple would move to another material – again, not the leather,” they continued.

For context, Kosutami had unveiled Apple’s plans to introduce the woven fabric on new Apple Watch bands weeks before they were announced, while they also leaked the first images of FineWoven accessories ahead of the event. Given the account’s previous credibility on this topic, it’s thought that this news is accurate as well.

And for many, it does not come as a surprise. Right from the get-go, the FineWoven cases were panned for their seemingly poor quality. Many questioned the premium price point (they cost $59 for iPhone cases and $99 for Apple Watch bands) for a product that felt much more run-of-the-mill than leather.

One customer compared it to cardboard and another likened it to “a polyester pillowcase sandwiched in a plastic shell”, calling the $59 price “insulting”. FineWoven products reportedly have high return rates, with complaints over dust retention, permanent scratches, the slippery texture, and a general lack of durability.

Apple’s FineWoven represents a missed opportunity

One of the most damning indictments came from The Verge writer and tech reviewer Allison Johnson, who labelled the FineWoven cases “really bad”. “Apple did a decent thing by discontinuing the leather cases, but FineWoven is just not the premium replacement we were looking for,” she wrote, describing how she was seeing signs of wear and bits of lint on newly unboxed cases.

“And then there’s the fingernail test,” she continued. “If I’m putting one of these cases on my phone, I’m inevitably going to scratch it on accident with a jagged fingernail edge, or it’s going to come into contact with my car keys. And when you scratch FineWoven, the results are seemingly permanent.”

The review criticised the high markup of the product, which has turned out to be the camel that broke the straw’s back. Studies show that consumers are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products – especially Gen Z, nearly half of whom would shell out more for something greener. That’s great for Apple, considering its hold on this demographic (87% of American Gen Zers have an iPhone).

But if a sustainable product doesn’t give people the same feel and satisfaction they’re used to, it’s not going to work. People already think eco-friendly products cost too much and, traditionally, they can be perceived as inferior, whether that’s in terms of quality or appearance. As ideas go, FineWoven was a fine one, but the execution has been a sizeable (and loud) misstep, which won’t bode well for how the alternative leather industry is perceived.

Producing leather, which is derived from animal hide, takes up a lot of energy and water, is linked to deforestation and biodiversity loss, and produces health-harming chemicals during tanning. It also has a much higher carbon footprint at 110kg of CO2e per sq m, compared to synthetic and plant-based alternatives.

So any efforts to remove leather from the consumer cycle are a good thing for the planet. But they need to satisfy people with their quality, especially if they carry a premium markup. While Apple’s FineWoven stock runs out (if the rumours are indeed true), it’ll be interesting to see where it goes next. Is there a new, better FineWoven 2.0? Will the company partner with one of the many market-proven startups making vegan leather? Or is this all just a ruse and FineWoven is – in Apple’s opinion – just fine?

And what of its collaboration with Hermès, which was to make four new Apple Watch bands with climate-friendly materials? A lot of questions remain, but we’re likely to be kept in the dark until September, when the company refreshes its lineup with iPhone 16 and the Apple Watch Series 10.

The post After Ditching Leather, Apple Nixes Vegan FineWoven Alternative Too – It’s A Big Miss appeared first on Green Queen.

Veganuary will soon host the first Choose Chicken-Free Week, as part of a wider rollout of mini-campaigns to complement its annual month-long initiative.

On the back of its most successful campaign to date, Veganuary is initiating additional initiatives throughout the year to encourage people to eat fewer animal products and more plant-based food.

It’s starting with the Choose Chicken-Free Week, which will run from April 29 to May 5. For the campaign, Veganuary has already captured the attention of restaurants and brands selling egg- and chicken-free food, including TiNDLE Foods, Next Level Burger, Loma Linda and The Mushroom Hub.

“There are many simple and surprising ways to replace eggs in your favourite recipes,” said Veganuary US director Sandra Hungate. “From everyday ingredients like banana and apple sauce to culinary innovations like aquafaba – the liquid from a can of chickpeas which can be whipped into a beautiful meringue – there’s an egg-free swap out there for everything from breakfast to dessert.”

Why Veganuary is targeting the chicken industry

Coinciding with Respect for Chickens Day (May 4), the campaign will see several of these brands and foodservice operators unveil new offerings and discounts on their products. Next Level Burger and its subsidiary Veggie Grill will launch limited-edition menu options in May, and Ike’s Love & Sandwiches will promote three vegan chicken sandos.

TiNDLE, meanwhile, will be running a two-for-one offer on its products, Vitacost and FireRoad Foods will provide a 15% discount, PLNT Burger will let consumers buy one chicken sandwich and get another for half the price, Loma Linda will put its starter pack (chicken in broth and BBQ sauce) on sale for $6.49, and The Mushroom Hub will roll out a pulled jerk lion’s mane experience box.

Brands will provide recipes using either plant-based chicken or egg – such as TiNDLE’s vegan garlic parm wings, Vitacost’s deviled eggs, and Atlantic Natural Food’s chicken enchiladas – or do away with chicken-related products altogether (think teriyaki tofu burgers by Nasoya and pulled jerk lion’s mane by The Mushroom Hub).

These efforts are to promote a shift away from the chicken industry, which is associated with intensive farming, health risks, animal cruelty and environmental pollution. Though chicken is the most popular meat of all, over the last few years, bouts of avian flu have led to a chicken shortage and subsequent price hike, which has coincided with the cost-of-living crisis – and this trend is set to continue this year.

In the US, almost all chickens (99.97%) are farmed in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – that amounts to 8.9 billion birds, versus the 3.6 million that aren’t raised in factories. Globally, as of 2021, over 73 billion chickens are slaughtered around the world each year, according to the FAO. The UN food body has actually advocated for a shift from red meats like beef to poultry, which it argues is less polluting.

While that is technically true, factory-farmed meat has a huge environmental footprint, and poultry meat is still near the top end of the highest-emitting foods, far above plant-based ingredients that are typically used to make analogues.

“For hens used for eggs, suffering is inherent in all methods of egg production – including free-range. Their lives are short, and for male chicks, very short indeed,” Veganuary explained on its website. “They are the wrong sex to lay eggs and the wrong breed for meat, so their lives are deemed to be worthless, and they are killed in the hatchery.”

Veganuary will launch more campaigns after ultra-successful 2024

Veganuary has been on an upward trajectory ever since it was launched in 2014. This year, 1.8 million people officially signed up to the campaign – more than doubling the number from 2023. But separate surveys commissioned by Veganuary have shown that in reality, that figure is much, much higher: the campaign estimates that around 25 million people decided to eat exclusively vegan in January 2024.

Its official survey found that the success rate during the challenge was 45%. And of those who ended up maintaining a plant-based diet throughout the month, 30% intended to continue doing so. If you aggregate that with its official signup numbers, this year’s campaign effectively influenced 540,000 people to ditch meat, dairy, eggs and other animal products.

Even among people who didn’t see Veganuary through, 95% said they’ll reduce their consumption of animal products to some extent, with 74% saying they’ll cut this by half or more. And 73% are very or extremely likely to give veganism a go again in the future.

People found eggs the second toughest animal food to part with during Veganuary (only behind cheese, though by a significant distance). Meanwhile, animal welfare was the number one driver of Veganuary participation this year. So it makes sense for Veganuary to introduce a campaign that touches upon a much-loved food in a much-derided industry.

“Veganuary is not a short-term phenomenon that comes to an end in January. With initiatives like #ChooseChickenFree, the Veganuary movement continues to grow as both individuals and businesses embrace plant-based year-round,” said Hungate.

The popularity of Veganuary is pretty apparent if you walk into a grocery store in most countries during January. It’s hard to escape it, and there are numbers to back that up. This year, more than 2,000 new products and dishes were unveiled during Veganuary. But given we need to accelerate our efforts to change how we eat, the campaign says it wants to have a longer-term effect, and has been working with individuals to support them with dietary shifts, and companies and restaurants to increase the number of vegan options across the calendar year.

This is why Choose Chicken-Free Week is just the start. “Over the summer, Veganuary will run additional campaigns such as Choose Fish-Free Week, BBQ Month, and Choose Dairy-Free Week, aimed at educating the public about the benefits of trying vegan,” said Hungate.

Whether these campaigns will have quite the effect of the main show at the beginning of the year, no one knows. But you only need to look at this year’s participation to know that there’s a strong precedent for them to work.

The post Choose Chicken-Free Week: Veganuary Announces First of Multiple New Campaigns appeared first on Green Queen.

Impossible Foods has invested in transitioning a farm from cattle production for meat to crop cultivation for plant-based meat, all while rescuing the cows in the process.

You’d be forgiven for immediately thinking of a new vegan buttermilk dressing when you hear the words ‘Impossible Ranch’. But that’s not what plant-based pioneer Impossible Foods is doing in South Carolina, where a now-former cattle farm will sport crops like soybeans, sunflowers and coconut trees.

These will support the manufacturing of Impossible Foods’ vegan beef, chicken and pork products, transforming the output of the farm from animal-derived meat to plant-based instead. In addition, the company is rescuing the cows on the property, and documenting the long-term transition project on its social media to allow consumers to follow along.

“Impossible Ranch is a living and breathing educational resource where our commitments to giving back to the planet and supporting animal welfare are front-and-centre, along with the plants representing key ingredients in our products,” said chief marketing and creative officer Leslie Sims. “We want to bring consumers along on this journey and help them understand how choosing meat from plants can be a better choice.”

A safe haven for cattle

The 70-acre Impossible Ranch is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Having operated as a cattle ranch for decades, the transition to crop farming sees Impossible Foods work in partnership with the family that has tended the land for so long. This, it says, helps it “honour the heritage” while highlighting a “renewed focus on animal welfare”.

In the US, 70% of cows and nearly all chickens and pigs are raised on factory farms – that totals over nine billion animals. But foods derived from industrial production methods come with many health risks. For example, in the US, water pollution from factory farms threatens or impairs over 14,000 miles of rivers and streams and more than 90,000 acres of lakes and ponds. According to the EPA, nitrogen and phosphorous waste from factory farms has been directly associated with aquatic deaths. And, in many parts of the world, animals have been culled for years to prevent the spread of zoonotic diseases.

Moreover, 575 billion lbs of animal waste are generated by a mere 5% of American concentrated animal feeding operations annually. This contains elements that “seriously degrade” rivers and contribute to antibiotic resistance among humans, leading to the American Public Health Association calling for a ban on new CAFOs.

Impossible Foods says its ranch is a “safe haven” for the property’s resident cattle, and is inviting customers to suggest names for the animals – which comprise six cows, two steers and a calf – with updates from the farm being shared on its social channels.

Apart from the health and water pollution aspects, there’s also an environmental benefit to this. Meat is twice as polluting as plant-based foods, and makes up 60% of all emissions from the food system. In fact, one peer-reviewed study last year (which involved inputs from Impossible Foods) revealed that swapping half of our pork, chicken, beef and milk production with plant-based analogues could halt deforestation and reduce agriculture and land use emissions by 31%.

Impossible Foods is ramping up consumer education efforts

As part of the launch, which coincides with Earth Day, Impossible Foods is taking over the Oculus Transportation Hub in Manhattan to exhibit the ranch to New York City commuters. The company argues this will help people envision a future where plant-based meat and cattle can coexist peacefully, at a time when the source of people’s food and what it does to the planet is garnering increased attention.

Sims alluded to this, noting: “As a leader of the plant-based category, we saw both a need and an opportunity to demystify meat from plants in a way that feels more approachable for consumers.”

This is the latest step in Impossible Foods’ efforts to educate and engage with consumers. Only last month, the company unveiled a brand refresh with new red packaging (a colour associated with superior taste for plant-based meat). The new look puts a greater spotlight on taste descriptors, visuals, and specific health credentials (like saturated fat and sodium content).

The idea was to lean into the meaty flavour and texture of its products, while pointing to their nutritional superiority over conventional counterparts. “We realised we can get even more consumers in the door by leading with our incredible taste and nutritional quality – then, we can seal the deal with the environmental benefits,” a company spokesperson told Green Queen last month. “With every converted consumer, we’re able to maximise our positive impact on the planet.”

This followed the launch of the Impossible Beef Lite last year, which carries the American Heart Association’s Heart-Check certification. It is one of the only meat analogues to be certified as heart-healthy, with a few products from Beyond Meat also appearing on that list.

“With every move we make, we want to set the tone that we’re an inclusive brand. We don’t want people to feel judged for loving meat, and we need to show them they don’t have to change their lifestyle in order to help the planet or their health,” the spokesperson said.

The farm transition project will doubtless push its mission further. Other similar initiatives include The Trasfarmation Project, Refarm’d, and the Dairy Farm Transition programme by Miyoko’s Creamery. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, RESPECTfarms is working on a similar vision for cultivated meat.

The post Impossible Ranch: Alt-Meat Giant to Transition Cattle Farm Into Crop Production for Plant-Based Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

The World Bank’s private sector arm is facing calls from climate and animal rights campaigners to phase out its financial support to industrial livestock farming.

Friends of the Earth, Compassion in World Farming and other climate and animal advocacy groups are urging the World Bank to stop funding industrial livestock farming operations, which are a major contributor to the climate crisis and undermine animal welfare, according to the Guardian.

The coalition alleges that the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – a World Bank Group member owned by 186 member countries and focused exclusively on the private sector in developing nations – provided $1.6B to factory farming projects between 2017 and 2023.

This creates a mismatch between the World Bank’s climate pledges (it has published Paris Agreement-aligned methodologies alongside other banks) and animal welfare commitments, and its financing of the industrial livestock sector, as well as putting smallholder farmers out of business and promoting greater meat consumption, according to Kelly McNamara, senior research and policy analyst at Friends of the Earth US.

“Expanding industrial livestock production is a threat to climate, sustainable development and food security,” she said.

IFC’s numerous factory farming financing projects

In June 2023, the IFC finalised a $47.3M loan to China’s Guangxi Yangxiang, which was intended to finance four multi-storey industrial pig rearing complexes (known as ‘hog hotels’) as well as a feed mill. These farms can be 13 floors high, and combine novel tech like AI and cloud competing with traditional pig-rearing practices.

“Yangxiang has created an industrial model with multifloor pig farming as the core and strives to build a high-end intelligent ‘meat factory’,” the company says on its website. One of its managers told Reuters in 2018: “There are big advantages to a high-rise building. It saves energy and resources. The land area is not that much but you can raise a lot of pigs.”

Likewise, in 2017, the IFC invested $50M in Chinese pig farming company GXYX, which has the capacity to breed over 235,000 pigs. A year later, it pumped $23M into India’s Srinivasa Farms to support its broiler and breeding expansion. And, in 2021, it provided $50M in financing to expand the pork and poultry operations of Ecuadorian producer Pronaca. The organisation has also funded projects like chicken production in Uganda and dairy production in Pakistan.

And, a year before approving the Guangxi Yangxiang loan, the World Bank subsidiary also granted a $200M loan to agrifood giant Louis Dreyfus Company to purchase deforestation-linked soy and corn mostly for factory farms in Europe and Asia. While it was said that these crops would be sourced from farmers committed to zero deforestation, the coalition says the IFC should “stop funding the wasteful use of such crops as animal feed”.

“I’m appalled by some of these developments, which have limited space and barren conditions,” said Peter Stevenson, chief policy adviser at Compassion in World Farming. “They are not just damaging for animal welfare, but also for food security and the environment.”

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, 77% of which covers animal agriculture (including feed crops) – but animal-based foods like meat and dairy provide 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of its protein supply. Stevenson explained that since animals convert cereal feed into meat and milk inefficiently, it would be better to grow more crops for direct human consumption and slash the amount of cereals used for feed.

IFC fails to account for financed emissions in climate targets

Livestock agriculture is responsible for 11-20% of the planet’s total emissions, and a third of the food system’s climate footprint. In fact, meat production generates twice as many greenhouse gases as plant-based foods, while using a lot more water and land – the growing of crops like soy or corn for animal feed is a key reason why.

The IFC knows this, noting that its investments in the livestock sector “seek to replace inefficient production processes with targeted and efficient practices”, calling it “a key step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions”. “IFC is committed to supporting the agribusiness sector to improve livelihoods and help people meet their nutritional needs, while taking steps to improve sustainable production by limiting use of resources, protecting the environment, and supporting animal welfare,” it notes on its website.

The organisation has committed to reducing its own scope 1 and 2 emissions by 20% by 2026 (from a 2016 baseline), but by financing large-scale livestock operations, its funding-related emissions will only increase.

The World Bank reiterated that climate change and animal welfare are central to the IFC’s agricultural investments, stating that large-scale projects can be used to develop more efficient, environmentally friendly practices. Its officials told the Guardian it strives to reduce GHG emissions in each project it finances.

But the coalition of campaign groups will be sending a letter to World Bank president Ajay Banga ahead of this month’s spring meeting, which will say the organisation must acknowledge that factory farming is a “major contributor to the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss” and phase out its funding of these operations.

The post Climate & Animal Activists Urge World Bank to Stop Financing Factory Farms appeared first on Green Queen.

The EU Commission is facing legal action from a European Citizens’ Initiative group after it failed to uphold a promised ban on caged farming in the region, despite overwhelming consumer support for the move.

End the Cage Age, a seven-member European Citizen Initiative (ECI), has launched legal action against the EU Commission after it went back on its commitment to ban the caged farming of animals like hens, pigs and rabbits.

In 2021, the EU endorsed a resolution promising to deliver proposals to ban caged farming by the end of 2023, following a petition signed by over 1.4 million Europeans and backed by a coalition of 170 NGOs. These included four laws that would abolish acts like keeping farm animals in cages, slaughtering day-old chicks, and the sale and production of fur.

However, a report in September indicated that the EU was thinking about abandoning this proposal, followed by all but one of the proposals being shelved from the EU Commission’s 2024 work programme. The ban is effectively on hold indefinitely now, following consistent pushback from agriculture lobby groups.

This is why End the Cage Age has decided to take legal action and hold the EU Commission accountable, having filed papers at the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Why End the Cage Age took the legal route

“While all farm animals benefit from current legislation on the protection of animals, only laying hens, broilers, sows and calves are covered by rules on caging. In its response to the ECI, the Commission commits to table, by the end of 2023, a legislative proposal to phase out, and finally prohibit, the use of cage systems for all animals mentioned in the Initiative,” the EU stated in 2021.

That has not come to fruition, leaving the futures of the more than 300 million pigs, hens, rabbits, ducks, quail and geese that are kept in cages across the region. According to animal rights charity Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), sows are forced to nurse their piglets in crates that are so small, they can’t even turn around, while rabbits and quail spend their whole lives in barren cages, and ducks and geese are caged and force-fed for foie gras production.

As part of the End the Cage Age coalition, CIWF is funding the legal action, which is described as the “first to hold the Commission to account over its failure to act on an ECI”. The legal filing highlights that ECIs were introduced with the intention of giving EU citizens more influence over decision-making, and that to renege on its promise to ban cages defeats the purpose of this tool.

Consumers’ stance on this issue couldn’t be clearer. In October, the EU Commission’s own Eurobarometer survey found that 89% of citizens supported the ban on caged farming. Its scientific advisory body, the European Food Safety Authority, has also backed a phaseout of cages on welfare grounds for various animals.

“We have launched this End the Cage Age legal action against the Commission on behalf of the voiceless animals and the millions of EU citizens who supported this legislation, believing the ECI to be a genuine democratic tool that would give them more influence over EU decision-making,” said Olga Kikou, our EU head at CIWF and member of End the Cage Age. “We will not rest until every cage is an empty cage.”

If the legal action is successful, the EU’s legislative arm would be mandated by the court to publish its proposals within a “clear and reasonable timescale”, and grant access to its file on the End the Cage Age ECI.

EU Commission ‘caved into pressure’ from ag lobby

The EU’s U-turn on the caged farming ban is widely thought to be a response to unprecedentedly aggressive lobbying from the livestock sector. In October, a joint investigation by three media outlets revealed that meat industry interest groups campaigned to “undermine science, co-opt journalists and pressure officials at the EU” to influence the law and decision-making around the proposals.

One EU official described it as the first time in a decade-long career that they felt such intensive pressure from a farming group. Another said that the lobbying had put “really aggressive pressure” on the EU Commission, which “enabled” the delay. Lobbyists targeted senior officials in the organisation, following which, the hierarchy’s viewpoints over the issue became “extremely negative”.

EU members were inundated with backlash via multiple channels, including an influential letter by industrial farming group Copa-Cogeca (which has deep ties with several MEPs), a 60-page report discrediting the EFSA’s proposed legislation, and public speaking engagements questioning scientists.

“Industry fought really hard and dirty on this file,” said Anja Hazekamp, vice-chair of the EU Parliament’s environment committee. “They tried everything they could think of because they know we desperately need animal welfare legislation to make our food system more sustainable and humane, and this was their last chance. They don’t want to change, but see that change is inevitable so they’re getting desperate. They will do anything to save their skins.”

In an op-ed for Euronews, Kikou accused EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen of caving in to pressure from the agriculture lobby. “We simply cannot allow the powerful farming lobby to have preferential access to decision-makers to influence them to backtrack on promises they have made to citizens,” she wrote.

End the Cage Age has received significant support from the EU parliament, where eight out of ten MEPs have voted in favour of a ban on caged farming. The ECI has garnered endorsements from over 170 European organisations representing scientists, farmers, climate activists, health campaigners, as well as the business sector.

“The European Commission promised EU citizens it would deliver a ban on cages,” said Kikou. “Not only has it failed the people, it has clearly failed the 300 million animals still suffering every day in cages. There is no justification for any further delay.”

The post EU Commission Facing Legal Action Over Failure to Deliver Caged Farming Ban appeared first on Green Queen.