The private sector arm of the World Bank is being accused of contributing to global heating and the undermining of animal welfare by providing financial support for factory farming, including the building of pig farming tower blocks in China.
A coalition of environmental and animal welfare groups has called on the World Bank to phase out financial support for large-scale “industrial” livestock operations. More than $1.6bn was provided for industrial farming projects between 2017 and 2023, according to an analysis by campaigners.
According to available information, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is part of the World Bank Group, is owned by 186 member countries including the UK, which has a 4.5% shareholding. Andrew Mitchell, the minister for development, is a governor of the IFC.
Kelly McNamara, who is a senior research and policy analyst at Friends of the Earth US, said there was a “mismatch” between the World Bank’s commitments on the climate crisis, sustainable development and animal welfare, and its financing of intensive farming. “Expanding industrial livestock production is a threat to climate, sustainable development and food security,” she said, adding that investing in such projects put smallholders out of business and increased meat consumption, fuelling global heating.
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Recall that In June last year, the IFC approved a $47.3m (£37.4m) loan to the Chinese company Guangxi Yangxiang providing capital for four multistorey industrial pig-rearing complexes and a feed mill. “There are big advantages to a high-rise building,” a company manager said during early construction of the blocks at Yaji Mountain in southern China in 2018. “The land area is not that much, but you can raise a lot of pigs.” The farms, known as “hog hotels”, can be 13 floors high.
The Yangxiang group also said that it has combined “internet technologies such as artificial intelligence [and] cloud computing” with the traditional pig-rearing business. The company says on its website: “Yangxiang has created an industrial model with multifloor pig farming as the core and strives to build a high-end intelligent ‘meat factory’.”
Peter Stevenson, who is chief policy adviser at Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), said: “I’m appalled by some of these developments, which have limited space and barren conditions. They are not just damaging for animal welfare, but also for food security and the environment.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
