EU spends four times more on livestock than agriculture
Stockholm, April 2 (Hibya) - The EU has made polluting diets "artificially cheap" by funneling four times more money into animal farming than plant breeding, a study says.
The CAP program, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, has "perverse consequences for the food transition" according to the study.
According to a study in Nature Food, more than 80 percent of public funds given to farmers through the EU's common agricultural policy (CAP) have gone to animal products since 2013, despite the harm they cause to society. Taking animal feed into account has doubled subsidies for a kilogram of beef, the meat with the largest environmental footprint, from €0.71 to €1.42.
The EU, which plans to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, spends around a third of its entire budget on CAP subsidies. "The vast majority of this goes to products that are driving us over the edge," said Paul Behrens, an environmental change researcher at Leiden University and co-author of the study.
The subsidy scheme, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, has "perverse consequences for the food transition," the researchers found, with livestock taking up more space than plants and crops that could go to people inefficiently spent on livestock.
Albania News Agency
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