The FAO Report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” (2006) highlighted the grave environmental impact of the global increase in meat production and consumption. The FAO view is supported by other authoritative reports such as the Stern Review “The Economics of Climate Change” (2006). At the current rate of increase in livestock production, urgent international action to counteract the predicted environmental crisis is required.

Compassion in World Farming offers a radical strategy to address this crisis, based on a planned reduction in meat production and consumption in the high-consuming nations, combined with a positive replacement of industrial agriculture with more environmentally sustainable and humane livestock systems worldwide.

"The increase in meat consumption suddenly looms as one of the biggest environmental crises that we are now facing"

Jonathon Porritt, Chair of the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission