The European Union (EU) has made polluting diets “artificially cheap” by pouring four times more money into animal farming than plant farming, according to a study.
The CAP programme, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, has 'adverse consequences for food transformation', according to the study.
More than 80 percent of public resources given to farmers through the EU's common agricultural policy (CAP) has gone to animal products since 2013, despite the damage they cause to society, according to a study in Nature Food. Factoring in animal feed doubled subsidies per kilogram of beef, the meat with the largest environmental footprint, from 0,71 euros to 1,42 euros.
The EU, which plans to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, spends about a third of its entire budget on CAP subsidies. “The vast majority of this goes to products that push us to the brink,” said Paul Behrens, an environmental change researcher at Leiden University and co-author of the study.
Researchers found that the subsidy plan, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, has “perverse consequences for the food transition,” with livestock taking up more space than plants and crops that could go to people being inefficiently spent on livestock farming.
To produce the same amount of protein, beef requires 20 times more land than nuts and 35 times more land than grains.