The World Bank and other large international development banks say they want to provide sustainable food systems, support biodiversity, reduce poverty and fight climate change.
But development banks are funneling billions more dollars into factory farms than into smaller farms that may mix crops and livestock and support a greater diversity of animal breeds, a new policy brief finds.
While development bank funding usually aims to increase food security in poorer countries, one of the brief’s three authors warns that, in at least one example, bank lending could be indirectly supporting the expansion of fast food restaurants in a richer country in addition to securing food supplies in a poorer one.
Over the five years from 2020 to 2024, 16 development banks collectively directed about $13 billion of financial support to industrial animal farms, compared to about $9 billion to support smaller, more diversified animal farms, according to the new policy brief by the International Accountability Project and the Critical Research on Industrial Livestock Systems Network.
The remaining $7 billion directed to animal agriculture was uncategorizable due to limited information. The policy brief has not been peer reviewed by a scientific journal.
This funding pattern, the brief says, “indicates a growing preference among major development finance institutions to support large-scale, commercially oriented animal agriculture operations,” while the non-industrial systems that “often represent smallholder or small-scale producers” receive less.
“We’ve known there’s a trend” toward development banks funding industrial livestock operations, Mehroosh Tak, one of the report’s co-authors and associate professor in economics at London’s SOAS University, tells Sentient. But this is the first time researchers have quantified that trend, she says.
Factory farms cause documented harms to the environment, animals and people. For example, they cause widespread destruction of forests and other wildlife habitats to grow vast monocultures of soy, corn and other animal-feed crops.
These monocultures reduce biodiversity, degrade the soil and rely on heavy pesticide use. The industry also relies on highly selective breeds of pigs, chickens and other livestock to produce ever more eggs, meat and milk at the expense of the animals’ own health.
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