06/10/2015

Last week brought great opportunities to engage with key policymakers for change.  With Farmageddon published in Italian earlier in the year, I was delighted to be the first in a series of presentations to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), billed as ‘Meet the Partners’. The event was opened by the FAO’s director of livestock production, Berhe Tekola and was live-streamed worldwide in addition to being well attended.

The next day saw me taking the Farmageddon message to Parliament in Rome. Interested MPs and their staff joined the conversation about industrial farming and its harmful affects on the countryside, health and the ability of future generations to feed themselves.

That night, my team and I were hosted by an Italian government diplomat along with a host of UN officials, where the linkages between industrial farming and other areas of societal concern, like climate change, became clear. Burgeoning livestock production, fuelled by factory farming, is already responsible for 14.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than all the world’s planes, trains and cars put together.

We discussed how, on business as usual projections, agriculture alone could take the world to the cusp of what in climate change circles they describe as the 2 degree Celsius ‘maximum safe limit’. The gathering discussed how the world’s governments need to heed this warning when they meet in Paris for the next round of climate talks later this year.

Last but not least were two appearances at the Ferrarra international literary festival. The first was a national radio discussion panel, a kind of ‘Any Questions’.  The second was a packed audience of about 700 people in Ferrarra’s new theatre to discuss the future of food.

Huge thanks to our dedicated team at CIWF Italia, ably lead by Annamaria Pisapia, for making the action-packed week happen.

The release of Farmageddon in Italian by publisher, Nutrimenti, has given us a real platform to take the factory farming message to a much wider audience.

We are now looking forward to the imminent release of Farmageddon in China…