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factory farms
Development Banks’ Factory Farm Investments Harm the Climate and Local Communities
Despite clear evidence of the harms of industrial livestock, new research showed that in 2024, 11 leading international finance institutions invested $1.23 billion in factory farming and wider industrial animal agriculture supply chains.
Jul 06, 2025
The World Bank’s mission is to “create a world free of poverty on a livable planet.” However, the institution, along with its peer development partners, pumps billions of dollars into factory farming, appearing to turn a blind eye to the significant harm it causes.
We cannot meet the 1.5°C Paris agreement goal without reducing emissions from livestock. Animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate breakdown; already responsible for around 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions and set to rise.
Factory farming is also tearing apart our thriving ecosystems. In Latin America, high demand for industrial grazing pasture and land for growing animal feed has fueled devastating deforestation: 84% of all Latin America’s forest loss in the last 50 years can be attributed to land claimed for livestock farming. Factory farming also pollutes soils and freshwater sources that wild animals and rural communities rely on.
Development banks tasked with tackling poverty and climate change owe it to current and future generations to use their investments to help spur the transition toward more sustainable diets and forms of food production.
Yet despite clear evidence of the harms of industrial livestock, new research I conducted for the Stop Financing Factory Farming Coalition (S3F), based on data from the Early Warning System, showed that in 2024, 11 leading international finance institutions (IFI) invested $1.23 billion in factory farming and wider industrial animal agriculture supply chains. This is five times more than what they spend on more sustainable non-industrial animal agriculture projects. The World Bank and its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), were together responsible for over half the funding for industrial animal agriculture.
One of the investments IFC made last year was a $40 million loan to build a soybean crushing plant in Bangladesh, used to mass-produce animal feed. The soybeans will require an estimated 354,000 hectares of land annually to be grown, and will be sourced from Brazil and Argentina where soy production is associated with destruction of sensitive ecosystems. Communities living near the plant have documented the existing and potential impacts such as the contamination of coastal waters and freshwater sources, which would consequently lead to a reduction in the local fish stocks that local communities rely on to guarantee their livelihoods, and brought their concerns in front of representatives of the U.S. government.
Over the last 20 years, IFC has also made a number of investments in Pronaca, the largest food producer in Ecuador, to expand its factory farm operations. The company has built pig and poultry farms in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, a region home to natural forest and Indigenous Peoples. Local Indigenous communities documented how the farms have polluted water resources that are traditionally used to sustain their livelihoods, forcing community members to migrate to preserve their traditional cultures.
Other IFIs have also made harmful investments. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) boldly claims all its investments have been Paris-aligned since January 2023; however, recent spending to expand multinational fast food chains in Eastern Europe seem to show a different scenario. During the first half of 2025, the EBRD has provided $10 million for the expansion of KFC and Taco Bell restaurants in the Western Balkans, and proposed an equity investment of $46 million for the expansion of Burger King and Louisiana Popeyes in Poland, Romania, and Czech Republic.
The latter investment would have led to the opening of 600 restaurants in the region, with large adverse impacts in terms of public health and emissions of greenhouse gases. Restaurant Brands International, which owns Burger King and Popeyes, reported approximately 29 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions along its value chain in 2024, more than the entire emissions of Northern Ireland. Thankfully, following civil society pressure, the investment was not approved by the EBRD’s Board of Directors.
While the overall picture is bleak, there is real room for hope. Between 2023 and 2024, IFI investments in factory farming nearly halved, and investments in more sustainable approaches tripled, from $77 million to US$244 million. Examples of promising investments include the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and the Inter-American Development Bank providing support to smallholder farmers using climate-friendly techniques.
This is clearly good news; however, it remains too early to tell if these figures are a one-off blip, or part of a longer-term trend. My hope is that the next round of investment data will show that harmful investments have dropped further—if not stopped completely—and more sustainable ones additionally increased.
Development banks tasked with tackling poverty and climate change owe it to current and future generations to use their investments to help spur the transition toward more sustainable diets and forms of food production, rather than replicating and expanding the broken systems that are wrecking our planet. By only investing in animal agriculture projects that are sustainable—following agroecological principles such as promoting species diversity and using nature’s resources efficiently—banks can help move us closer toward “a world free of poverty on a livable planet.”
Scapegoating Wild Birds Won’t Solve Avian Flu: We Need Radical Farming Reform
As we reflect on the wonder of migratory birds, and the spotlight focuses on how our cities and communities can be made more bird-friendly, we must also consider how our food system is posing a threat to their very existence.
May 10, 2025
For migratory and other wild birds, bird flu is a disaster. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, states that 169 million U.S. poultry have been affected by highly pathogenic bird flu since January 2022. Yet worldwide, tens of millions of wild birds have died of bird flu—which has also spread to mammals, including over 1,000 US. dairy herds.
Saturday 10 May is World Migratory Bird Day, a global event for raising awareness of migratory birds and issues related to their conservation. The poultry industry and governments like to blame wild birds for bird flu. However, the Scientific Task Force on Avian Influenza and Wild Birds—which includes the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) stresses that wild birds are in fact the victims of highly pathogenic bird flu; they do not cause it. As a recent study states, “This panzootic did not emerge from nowhere, but rather is the result of 20 years of viral evolution in the ever-expanding global poultry population.”
Until recently, the bird flu viruses that circulate naturally in wild birds were usually of low pathogenicity; they generally caused little harm to the birds. It is when it gets into industrial poultry sheds—often on contaminated clothing, feed, or equipment—that low pathogenic avian influenza can evolve into dangerous highly pathogenic avian influenza.
Governments worldwide appear to have no strategy for how to end these regular bird flu outbreaks other than to hope they will eventually die down.
Industrial poultry production, in which thousands of genetically similar, stressed birds are packed into a shed, gives a virus a constant supply of new hosts; it can move very quickly among the birds, perhaps mutating as it does so. In this situation, highly virulent strains can rapidly emerge. The European Food Safety Authority warns that it is important to guard against certain low pathogenic avian influenza subtypes entering poultry farms “as these subtypes are able to mutate into their highly pathogenic forms once circulating in poultry.”
Once highly pathogenic avian influenza strains have developed in poultry farms, they can then be carried back outside—for example, through the large ventilation fans used in intensive poultry operations—and spread to wild birds. The Scientific Task Force states that since the mid-2000s spillover of highly pathogenic bird flu from poultry to wild birds has occurred “on multiple occasions.”
So, low pathogenic bird flu is spread from wild birds to intensive poultry where it can mutate into highly pathogenic bird flu, which then spills over to wild birds and can even return back to poultry in a growing and continuing vicious circle.
Following its evolution in farmed poultry, the highly pathogenic virus has adapted to wild birds, meaning that it is circulating independently in wild populations, with some outbreaks occurring in remote areas that are distant from any poultry farms.
Is There a Health Risk for Humans?
While the health risk to humans from bird flu may be low, it cannot be ignored. Highly pathogenic avian influenza has spread to mammals including otters, foxes, seals, dolphins, sea lions, dogs, and bears. Worryingly, it has been found in a Spanish mink farm where it then was able to spread from one infected mink to another.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said that cow-to-cow transmission is a factor in the spread of bird flu in dairy herds. The ability for bird flu to move directly from one mammal to another is troubling as a pandemic could ensue if it could move directly from one human to another.
Scientists at Scripps Research reveal that a single mutation in the H5N1 virus that has recently infected U.S. dairy cows could enhance the virus’ ability to attach to human cells, potentially increasing the risk of passing from person to person.
A 2023 joint statement from the World Health Organization, the FAO, and WOAH stated that, while avian influenza viruses normally spread among birds, “the increasing number of H5N1 avian influenza detections among mammals—which are biologically closer to humans than birds are—raises concern that the virus might adapt to infect humans more easily.”
Some mammals may also act as mixing vessels, leading to the emergence of new viruses that could be more harmful.
Pigs as Mixing Vessels
Pigs can be infected by avian and human influenza viruses as well as swine influenza viruses. Pigs can act as mixing vessels in which these viruses can reassort (i.e. swap genes) and new viruses that are a mix of pig, bird, and human viruses can emerge. The U.S. CDC explains that if the resulting new virus infects humans and can spread easily from person to person, a flu pandemic can occur.
Need for a Coherent Strategy to End Bird Flu
Governments worldwide appear to have no strategy for how to end these regular bird flu outbreaks other than to hope they will eventually die down. There is no sign of this happening. Without an exit strategy we are likely to face repeated, devastating outbreaks of bird flu for years to come. We need an action plan to restructure the poultry and pig sectors to reduce their capacity for generating highly pathogenic diseases.
We need to:
- Move to a poultry sector with smaller flocks and lower stocking densities to give the birds more space. Transmission and amplification of bird flu would be much less likely in such conditions.
- End the practice of clustering a large number of poultry farms close together in a particular area. Between-farm spread is a major contributor to the transmission of highly pathogenic bird flu.
- End the use of birds genetically selected for very fast growth. Such birds have impaired immune systems making them more susceptible to disease.
In light of pigs’ capacity for acting as mixing vessels for human, avian, and swine influenza viruses, the pig sector too needs to be restructured to make it less vulnerable to the transmission and amplification of influenza viruses. As with poultry, this would involve reducing stocking densities, smaller group sizes, and avoiding concentrating large numbers of farms in a particular area.
As we reflect on the wonder of migratory birds, and the spotlight focuses on how our cities and communities can be made more bird-friendly, we must also consider how our food system is posing a threat to their very existence. Failure to rethink industrial farming leaves us vulnerable, with the continued devastation of wild birds and poultry, and perhaps even a human pandemic.
The Real Reason for Soaring Egg Prices? Gouging by the 'Rotten Egg Oligarchy'
A new Food & Water Watch report details how "corporations use the worsening bird flu crisis to jack up egg prices, even as their own factory farms fuel the spread of disease."
Mar 04, 2025
The nation's largest egg producers would have American consumers believe that avian flu and inflation are behind soaring prices, but a report published Tuesday shows corporate price gouging is the real culprit driving the record cost of the dietary staple.
The fourth installment of Food & Water Watch's (FWW) Economic Cost of Food Monopolies series—titled The Rotten Egg Oligarchy—reports that the average price of a dozen eggs in the United States hit an all-time high of $4.95 in January 2025. That's more than two-and-a-half times the average price from three years ago.
"While egg prices spiral out of reach, making eggs a luxury item, Big Ag is profiting hand over fist," FWW research director Amanda Starbuck said in a statement. "But make no mistake—today's high prices are built on a foundation of corporate price gouging. Our research shows how corporations use the worsening bird flu crisis to jack up egg prices, even as their own factory farms fuel the spread of disease."
FWW found that "egg prices were already rising before the current [avian flu] outbreak hit U.S. commercial poultry flocks in February 2022, and have never returned to pre-outbreak levels."
Furthermore, "egg price spikes hit regions that were bird flu-free until recently," the report states. "The U.S. Southeast remained free of bird flu in its table egg flocks until January 2025, and actually increased egg production in 2022 and 2023 over 2021 levels. Nevertheless, retail egg prices in the Southeast rose alongside January 2023's national price spikes."
"The corporate food system is to blame for exacerbating the scale of the outbreak as well as the high cost of eggs," the publication continues. "Factory farms are virus incubators, with the movement of animals, machines, and workers between operations helping to spread the virus."
"Meanwhile, just a handful of companies produce the majority of our eggs, giving them outsized control over the prices paid by retailers, who often pass on rising costs to consumers," the paper adds. "This highly consolidated food system also enables companies to leverage a temporary shortage in one region to raise prices across the entire country."
Cal-Maine, the nation's top egg producer, enjoyed a more than 600% increase in gross profits between fiscal years 2021-23, according to FWW. The Mississippi-based company did not suffer any avian flu outbreaks in fiscal year 2023, during which it sold more eggs than during the previous two years. Yet it still sold conventional eggs at nearly three times the price as in 2021, amounting to over $1 billion in windfall profits. Meanwhile Cal-Maine paid shareholders dividends totaling $250 million in 2023, 40 times more during the previous fiscal year.
The report highlights how factory farming creates ideal conditions for the spread of avian flu, a single case of which requires the extermination of the entire flock at the affected facility, under federal regulations.
"These impacts cannot be understated," FWW stressed. "Today's average factory egg farm confines over 800,000 birds, with some operations confining several million. This magnifies the scale of animal suffering and death, as well as the enormous environmental and safety burden of disposing of a million or more infected bird carcasses."
Citing U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures, The Guardian reported Tuesday that more than 54 million birds have been affected in the past three months alone.
Egg producers know precisely how the supply-and-demand implications of these outbreaks and subsequent culls can boost their bottom lines. Meanwhile, they play a dangerous game as epidemiologists widely view a potential avian flu mutation that can be transmitted from birds to humans as the next major pandemic threat—one that's exacerbated by the Trump administration's withdrawal from the World Health Organization and cuts to federal agencies focused on averting the next pandemic.
"We cannot afford to place our food system in the hands of a few corporations that put corporate profit above all else."
So far, 70 avian flu cases—one of them fatal—have been reported in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, under Trump, the CDC has stopped publishing regular reports on its avian flu response plans and activities. The USDA, meanwhile, said it "accidentally" terminated staffers working on avian flu response during the firing flurry under Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The agency is scrambling to reverse the move.
"We cannot afford to place our food system in the hands of a few corporations that put corporate profit above all else," the FWW report argues. "Nor can we allow the factory farm system to continue polluting our environment and serving as the breeding ground for the next human pandemic."
"We need to enforce our nation's antitrust laws to go after corporate price fixing and collusion," the publication adds. "We also need a national ban on new and expanding factory farms, while transitioning to smaller, regional food systems that are more resilient to disruptions."
That is highly unlikely under Trump, whose policies—from taxation to regulation and beyond—have overwhelmingly favored the ultrawealthy and corporations over working Americans. Meanwhile, one of the president's signature campaign promises, to lower food prices "on day one," has evaporated amid ever-rising consumer costs.
According to the USDA's latest Food Price Outlook, overall food prices are projected to rise 3.4% in 2025. Eggs, however, are forecast to soar a staggering 41.1% this year—and possibly by as much as 74.9%.
"If President Trump has any interest in fulfilling his campaign pledge to lower food prices," Starbuck stressed, "he must begin by taking on the food monopolies exploiting pandemic threat for profit."
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