Today (5 May), we delivered an open letter to Downing Street with more than  80,000 global signatures – including over 22,000 from the UK – calling on the Prime Minister to stop feeding factory farms and fix our broken food system. 

The open letter follows the release of our Food Not Feed report, urging  the Government to end the world’s biggest form of food waste by cutting the use of  human-edible grain –  such as wheat, barley and oats – to feed factory farmed animals. 

Shockingly, the amount of grain lost per year in the UK as a result of being fed to animals is 8.3m tonnes – far greater than the 6.4m tonnes of household food waste. 

Hugely wasteful

The letter explains the huge inefficiencies of using grain for factory farmed animals, highlighting that for every 100 calories of human-edible grain fed to animals, just 3-25 calories of meat or dairy are produced. 

In the UK, feeding human-edible grain to animals wastes at least 790,000 hectares of the UK’s arable land – the size of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk combined. If this land were used to grow more efficient and less wasteful  human-edible food like legumes, pulses, fruit and vegetables, we could feed 16.5 million more people in the UK alone.  

Dr Amir prescribes an alternative

Dr Amir Khan, NHS GP and Compassion Patron, who signed the letter, said: 

It’s deeply concerning that so many families are having to skip meals and children are arriving at school hungry. In my GP practice, I’m increasingly seeing children who are clearly undernourished, and it’s disheartening to watch public money continue to support a food system that isn’t meeting their needs.

It’s clear that factory farming is one of the least efficient ways to produce food and it is driving food insecurity in the UK. The Government must stop wasting food and the public’s money on factory farms.  Let’s scrap the grain that’s not feeding us at all and grow diverse, healthy, nutritious crops instead like fruit, vegetables, legumes, pulses, peas, beans, nuts and seeds. We need to start feeding people. Our lives literally depend on it.

Other celebrities  who  added their name to the letter in the UK include Deborah Meaden, Dragons Den investor and businesswoman and Marc Abraham OBE, vet and animal welfare campaigner.

The letter was also signed by distinguished actors, including Brian Cox, Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Mara and Rooney Mara.

 Let’s grow food for people

Anthony Field, Head of our UK office, said:

Our report shows how utterly inefficient our current UK food system is. We’re  squandering vital protein and agricultural land that could be better used to grow a wider range of  foods to feed people – in fact 16.5 million more people annually and an astonishing two billion people worldwide.

Factory farming is wasting a staggering 8.3 million tonnes each year in the UK meanwhile thousands of people go hungry and the demand for food banks continues. World events increasingly highlight the need for UK food security, so let’s end the biggest form of animal cruelty and eco-crisis. Government must urgently start growing nutritious nature-friendly crops and feed them directly to people and it must support farmers to make that switch. Let’s grow food for people, not feed for animals in factory farms.

A better way

Pioneering farmers are already showing that there’s a better way, farming in harmony with nature to provide healthy and sustainable food while allowing ecosystems to thrive.

Prime Minister: stop feeding factory farms