As well as being devastating for animals, intensive farming is also a major cause of climate change, environmental damage, and threats to human health.

Our food system is in urgent need of reform and, thanks to your vision of a better future for animals, people and the planet, we’re making significant progress towards the goal of a Global Agreement to end factory farming.

Leading the conversation

In December 2020, we grasped the agenda ahead of a year of United Nations summits with a high-profile, online event promoting healthier diets and nature-positive, higher welfare farming.

‘How to Love Food and Save Nature’ was a collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the influential EAT forum. It also featured progressive food businesses and introduced the radical Regenerative Organic certification scheme, developed with input from CIWF USA.

Being the voice for change

In 2021, Compassion’s Global CEO, Philip Lymbery, was appointed as a United Nations Food Systems Champion, representing animal welfare organisations in Europe and beyond.

Through determined negotiation and persuasion, Philip helped put nature-friendly, higher welfare farming and reduced global meat consumption on the radar for the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

An influential partnership

Also early in 2021, long-term work behind the scenes bore fruit, when over 25,000 people attended the online launch of ‘Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss’.

This report by the renowned scientific policy institute, Chatham House, was produced in partnership with Compassion and UNEP. It highlights how the global food system is threatening 24,000 species at risk of extinction.

The report gained huge global media coverage, reaching audiences from the UK to Colombia, Nigeria to China, with the message that plant-rich diets and ending factory farming are vital for preserving and restoring biodiversity.

Saving our antibiotics

Antibiotics are often used routinely on intensive farms, to prevent diseases in animals who are stressed, overcrowded or bred to grow unnaturally fast.

As a founding member of the Alliance to Save our Antibiotics, Compassion highlights this cruel misuse of medicines and how it contributes to the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria.

Thanks to campaigners like you, the Alliance helped secure an EU ban, from 2022, on the routine preventative farm use of antibiotics. And, this year, it released a ground-breaking research report: ‘Antibiotic Use in Organic Farming: Lowering Use Through Good Husbandry’

This report shows organic farming in the UK may use as little as a quarter of the national average level of antibiotics – clearly demonstrating that higher welfare farming practices may help protect animal and human health.

What next?

With your support, we’ll continue to develop our relationships with NGO partners and key UN bodies, to influence policy and planning for food system reform.
Through direct dialogue and public campaigning, we’ll help ensure the EU’s ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy meets our goals for animal welfare, reducing antibiotic and pesticide use, and increasing emphasis on organic farming.
Together, we’ll develop and launch a new online platform and coalition campaign to create a new global movement for a humane, fair, sustainable food system.

It is time to change how we produce and consume, including to reduce greenhouse emissions. Transforming food systems is crucial for delivering all the Sustainable Development Goals.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres