FARMING

WhpWhatWny -  Fifteen development banks and a fund tasked with supporting sustainable economic growth are investing billions of dollars to expand factory farming in the Global South and other lower income countries, a new analysis from the nonprofit Stop Financing Factory Farming finds. The lower income countries where banks are funding industrial agriculture are often the same countries that are more vulnerable to the extreme weather linked to climate change, which itself is fueled by industrial meat and dairy operations. The analysis finds 15 banks and one fund, including the World Bank Group and the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund, invested just over $3 billion on animal agriculture in 2023, with over three quarters of the funded projects described by the researchers as factory farms. Another $3.4 billion was marshaled from other private and public funders.

Factory farms are responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of global greenhouse emissions, as well as a host of other impacts like water pollution, pandemic risks, and animal suffering. The analysis is based on data from a civil society database called the Early Warning System, which collects funding information from project websites.