Half Empty, Half Cage-Free

A year and a half after the European Commission stated in its Vision for Agriculture and Food that the livestock sector ‘requires a long-term vision’, they delivered. At least in the literal sense. Delivered right on time - unlike previously promised animal welfare proposals and communications, with Fur being just one example - the 20-page document aims to advance all aspects of the sector: resilience, competitiveness, sustainability – including animal welfare –, territoriality and excellence. You name it, the Livestock Strategy promises to strengthen it, because all objectives should reinforce one another. Let’s see how well that holds up.

Starting on a positive note, the Strategy does at least reject the idea that animal welfare and competitiveness are polar opposites, a lot more than some past Commission documents have managed. It even indicates that improved animal welfare can reduce diseases, mortality and improve feed conversion. Essentially, higher welfare can even improve productivity. As a result – or was it because of societal expectations? – it commits, on paper, to a targeted revision of the animal welfare rules for laying hens and broilers by the end of 2026, and for pigs by mid-2027. The Strategy also acknowledges the welfare issues associated with the live exports of animals to third countries, especially for immediate slaughter, and floats the idea of supporting mobile and small-scale slaughterhouses to cut transport distances. Welcome mentions but for now they amount to little. Even for the specific legislative revisions the Commission does commit itself to, caution is required, particularly given its use of the term “targeted”. Read closely and the scope of the promised hen, broiler and pig proposals seems limited to cages, indicators, chick culling and imports. Stocking densities, flooring, mutilations and everything else that makes “non-confined” housing meaningfully different from “still miserable, just without bars” don’t get a mention. Every animal other than a hen, broiler or pig is however even worse off as they got folded into “enforcement of existing rules and the need for a progressive follow-up to the End the Cage Age initiative”. In Brussels-speak “we’ll get to it, eventually, when the time is right, maybe, or maybe not”.

Whilst the Strategy, rightly, indicates that higher animal welfare standards will require investments, highlighting several potential sources – such as CAP funds, EIB loans, state aid and a “potential dedicated financial instrument” – it hammers down the message that this also requires a stable, clear legislative framework. Investment security cannot exist without it. Seems ironic considering the suggested sector-by-sector rollout of separate legislative proposals – which is close to the opposite of a stable, predictable framework. If unpredictability is squeezing investment today, stretching that same issue over several more years is not a cure, it’s a slow-motion version of the same illness.   

What’s missing is one problem. Some of what is included is another. Enter genetic breeding – the Commission's newest contender for buzzword of the term? The concept is held up as a way to improve animals’ resilience to changing climatic conditions such as drought. It is, simultaneously, put forward as the solution for the sector’s emission problem where genetic improvements – such as methane reducing breeds – are mentioned alongside precision feeding and biogas as measures to reduce GHG emissions. Pushing genetic traits doesn’t just risk creating welfare issues of its own – broiler breeding being an excellent example of what selecting for one trait can do to the rest of the animal – it also runs straight into EU law, which says animals can only be kept for farming purposes if it can expected, based on their genotype or phenotype, to not harm their health or welfare. Breeding animals to adapt them to the system, rather than building a system they can survive in, isn't innovation. It's outsourcing the fix to the animal.

It’s almost funny seeing that the Strategy landed merely three months after the EU’s own Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change told the Commission, in no uncertain terms, that technology alone won’t close the gap, and called for cutting animal numbers, shifting diets, taxing farm emissions and pulling subsidies from the most polluting production. The Strategy does none of that. It promises a technofix – the very kind that won’t cut it – and skips everything else altogether. To its credit, it does clock the contradiction, at least in passing: it acknowledges that livestock concentration causes pollution and biodiversity loss, while extensive grazing and organic farming actively support nature and welfare. That’s a fair diagnosis. It’s just one the Strategy declines to act on, leaning on public procurement, school meals and promotion campaigns to sell more European meat and dairy – not less. “We are not imposing diets,” Agriculture Commissioner Hansen said at the launch of the Strategy, “we are promoting choice.” Sure. Except a few pages earlier the same Strategy called for halting ‘decapitalisation’ which requires exactly one thing: people buying more animal products, not fewer. That's not neutrality. That's demand-side policy with a straight face. And it’s not just the Strategy. The Protein Plan that landed on the same day? Same story, different angle. It sets a concrete target to grow EU-produced protein crops, but for animal feed, not human food. Plant protein for people? No target at all.

So. What is, in practice, left of the promise to make resilience, competitiveness, sustainability - including animal welfare – territoriality and excellence "mutually reinforcing"? The fine print of the document reveals a clear hierarchy: nearly everything in this Strategy is written in service of one objective – competitiveness – with the rest expected to fall in line behind it. Reinforcement, it turns out, runs one way.

The trouble is, even on its own terms, this doesn't work. The Commission is right that investment needs a stable, predictable legal framework – it says so explicitly when explaining why farmers won't put capital into cage-free conversions without one. But predictability can't be rationed out one species and one piece of legislation at a time. Farmers have no way of knowing whether their sector will be next year's "targeted revision." If the Commission actually wants the investment certainty it keeps preaching, the answer is sitting in its own toolbox: an EU-wide animal welfare framework, setting out the general welfare principles applicable to all farmed animals, with species-specific requirements rolled out on a set timetable under tertiary legislation. Hens and pigs can still go first. But every farmer, in every sector, would know what's coming and by when – providing the predictability the Commission insists the sector cannot do without.

As it stands, the Commission has built a strategy that reads like a menu and functions like a waiting queue. Call that a long-term vision if you like. But it’s really just – Half Empty, Half Cage-Free – and right now, the Commission is still deciding which half it's serving.