www.silverguide.site –

The number of mammals and poultry farmed worldwide has increased by half in the last two decades, research shows, and the amount of cropland used for feeding livestock has increased by about a quarter.

These increases are putting rising pressure on natural systems, threatening wildlife and plant species and adding to the climate crisis.

The rising demand for meat comes at a time when agricultural land is already becoming less fertile, with an area the size of Canada now suffering degradation. This situation is worsening: about 90% of water withdrawn from natural systems for irrigation is used to grow animal feed.

These findings, from an alliance of campaigning organisations called Stop Financing Factory Farming, come 20 years after the publication of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s seminal report on animal farming, Livestock’s Long Shadow. The researchers have updated key aspects of the report, and found that most trends are moving in a negative direction.

Peter Stevenson, the chief policy adviser at the Compassion in World Farming campaign group, told the Guardian that even where progress had been made, for instance by reducing the amount of greenhouse gas produced per unit of meat, it was often outweighed by the sheer increase in the livestock population. Emissions from livestock grew by more than a fifth between 2001 and 2023, according to the FAO. “There’s been a huge increase, and it’s simply because there are so many more livestock now,” he said. About 33 billion livestock mammals and poultry have been added globally in 20 years: there were 94.9 billion farmed animals – the number slaughtered or used for milk or eggs – in 2023, up from 61.8 billion in 2006.

Increasing quantities of fertiliser are being used to produce animal feed, which along with the dumping of slurry is leading to dead zones in seas, with the biggest in the Gulf of Mexico, where marine life is being wiped out across an area the size of Connecticut.

Merel van der Mark, the head of animal welfare and finance at the campaign group Sinergia Animal, said only a widespread shift away from the meat-heavy diets that have become the norm in many parts world would reverse the trend towards greater planetary damage.

She called on publicly funded development banks, which provided $1.23bn (£930m) to intensive farms in 2024, to lead the charge by changing their investment criteria. “This means a shift away from industrial livestock production, which multilateral development banks must support by stopping financing factory farming and instead aligning their financial flows with a more sustainable world,” she said.