The European Commission today presented its long-awaited Livestock Strategy, intended to set out a plan to create the conditions for a resilient, competitive and sustainable livestock sector.
Unfortunately, the strategy addresses the current intensive animal farming model without challenging its economic and environmental unsustainability. It does not offer a clear vision for strengthening resilience and only timidly encourages future-proof agroecological approaches, such as extensive grazing and mixed farming, which have proven positive impacts on biodiversity, climate, soil and water.
“The Livestock Strategy reads as if a collection of buzzwords has been fed into a faulty AI chatbot and turned into a vision document. It praises the strengths of Europe’s livestock sector, promotes technological fixes, and fails to address the fundamental challenge: an intensive livestock model that exceeds environmental limits, concentrates production in a few regions, and leaves many farmers struggling to make a decent living,” said Laurence Modrego, Senior Policy Officer, Sustainable Agriculture & Food.
The strategy fails to address the unsustainability of Europe’s intensive livestock model, which drives environmental and climate impacts while often leaving farmers without a fair income. At the same time, the Commission does not acknowledge the need for a significant transition in the sector, instead placing considerable emphasis on the benefits of grazing and the competitiveness of the EU livestock industry compared with the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, nature-positive approaches, including organic farming, extensive grazing and mixed crop-livestock systems, receive only limited support, with no further action proposed beyond the insufficient incentives included in the post-2027 Common Agricultural Policy proposal.
The Commission’s suggestion to facilitate nutrient transfers from surplus to deficit regions highlights a missed opportunity to tackle the root causes of the problem. Intensive livestock production remains overly concentrated in certain parts of Europe and disconnected from the land’s carrying capacity. This strategy misses a concrete plan for a territorial approach to animal farming, focused on closing nutrient cycles at the lowest possible level to avoid losses, prioritising on-farm diversification and circularity, and promoting mixed crop-livestock systems.
“The European Commission is basically pouring water on the smoke while leaving the fire burning. Instead of addressing excessive livestock densities, the Livestock Strategy perpetuates the intensive production model by proposing to move nutrient surpluses elsewhere rather than reducing them at source,” underlined Modrego.
The Commission also proposes to reduce emissions through technological solutions. Unfortunately, these will fail to deliver the systemic change needed to address the sector’s environmental and climate impacts.
On a more positive note, the Commission will consider a dedicated financial instrument to support the transition of the livestock sector towards higher levels of sustainability and animal welfare, although it remains evasive about its objectives and design.
WWF submission to the call for evidence on the Livestock Strategy
