Big Meat had a good year in Europe. Plans to set emission limits for large-scale cattle farms were scrapped. Rules requiring landowners to restore wetlands were mostly gutted. And a keenly anticipated reform of the animal welfare rules was mostly consigned to the deep freeze. Among those promised animal welfare reforms: legislation to End the Cage Age. The idea was that hens, pigs, calves, rabbits, and quail would no longer be reared in conditions that inflict suffering and that underpin industrial farming, which is responsible for large amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollution. The campaign to end cages was the result of a European Citizens Initiative that garnered 1.4 million signatories and was backed by key European commissioners, parliamentarians, and scores of environmental and consumer rights and animal protection advocates. But in her state of the union speech, in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made no mention of animal welfare, let alone cages. And by October, the European Commission was in full retreat. So, what happened? In this episode: a deep dive into the activities and influence of a group called European Livestock Voice with Andrea Bertaglio, who is a journalist and the group’s campaign manager. Also in this episode: Thin Lei Win, the lead food systems reporter for Lighthouse Reports that oversaw the investigation; Arthur Neslen, a freelance journalist for The Guardian; Silvia Lazzaris, editor at Food Unfolded; and Olga Kikou, the head of Compassion in World Farming in Brussels. “This takes us far beyond animal welfare,” says Olga. “It’s a democracy issue.”
Big Meat had a good year in Europe. Plans to set emission limits for large-scale cattle farms were scrapped. Rules requiring landowners to restore wetlands were mostly gutted. And a keenly anticipated reform of the animal welfare rules was mostly consigned to the deep freeze. Among those promised animal welfare reforms: legislation to End the Cage Age. The idea was that hens, pigs, calves, rabbits, and quail would no longer be reared in conditions that inflict suffering and that underpin industrial farming, which is responsible for large amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollution. The campaign to end cages was the result of a European Citizens Initiative that garnered 1.4 million signatories and was backed by key European commissioners, parliamentarians, and scores of environmental and consumer rights and animal protection advocates. But in her state of the union speech, in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made no mention of animal welfare, let alone cages. And by October, the European Commission was in full retreat. So, what happened? In this episode: a deep dive into the activities and influence of a group called European Livestock Voice with Andrea Bertaglio, who is a journalist and the group’s campaign manager. Also in this episode: Thin Lei Win, the lead food systems reporter for Lighthouse Reports that oversaw the investigation; Arthur Neslen, a freelance journalist for The Guardian; Silvia Lazzaris, editor at Food Unfolded; and Olga Kikou, the head of Compassion in World Farming in Brussels. “This takes us far beyond animal welfare,” says Olga. “It’s a democracy issue.”
So this recording, it was from May of this year at an agricultural industry event in Virginia, in the United States. And there's this journalist, and he's talking about how he's swapping sides. To now support the livestock industry.
Andrea Bertaglio:So hi, everyone, my name is Andrea Bertaglio. I'm, I'm a journalist, actually, I'm an environmental journalist since 18 years. And that's still my still my official identity. But my real job now is to work to inform the public about livestock production, actually. So I'm the campaign manager of this project called the European Livestock Voice. The main target is the so called European bubble.
Thin Lei Win:So, you know, I thought, we really should try and find out if there will be impacts of this on the EU. And, of course, the EU's efforts to get farming in line with what science says that we really need to be doing for health, animal welfare, and climate, and so on. And yeah, it turns out that already seems like there's been quite an impact.
Podcast Jingle:No more migrants in. No Europe without Christianity. An allliance, also with Russia.
James Kanter:EU Scream. Episode 93. Big Meat's Big Win, in Europe. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. Many of us will soon be sitting down to meaty lunches and dinners. And all of that meat still is astonishingly cheap and plentiful, at least by historical standards. But the kind of farming that can be counted on to deliver so much, and so affordably, is an urgent global concern. Industrial scale animal farming stands accused of doing too little to reduce its impact on the environment and the climate. Authorities are taking steps to get farms to clean up their acts. And to farm less intensively, just as scientists step up calls for policies like a tax on meat to reduce demand. In response, the rise, and rise, of the angry farmer. In The Netherlands there's a Farmer Citizen Movement. The movement won seven seats in the recent general election. And it's now the biggest political party in the Dutch Senate. Across Europe, there's more and more talk of rural revolt, against rules on pollution, on chemicals, and on animal welfare. In Brussels too, at the level of the EU institutions, you'll hear many more of these voices these days. In fact, we've already heard from one of them. Well, sort of.
Thin Lei Win:This farming voice is not a farmer at all. He's from Milan.
James Kanter:That's Thin Lei Win, who we'll hear from throughout this episode, she's talking about Andrea Bertaglio. The journalist turned meat lobbyist. Andrea and Thin come from opposing sides in this matter. And we'll hear a lot more from Andrea too and about his projects.
Thin Lei Win:These days he does a lot of work with big agriculture, particularly with a group called European Livestock Voice, which is very active in the EU in Brussels. And I have to say that his time there has coincided with a period of successes for the livestock industry. Take the animal welfare rules, for example, they're getting vandalized.
James Kanter:Thin is just one of the experts who explains what's behind big meat's big win in Europe. Also in this episode, Olga Kikou of the NGO Compassion in World Farming. Arthur Neslen, a freelance reporter for The Guardian newspaper, and Silvia Lazzaris. She heads editorial strategy for Food Unfolded, a digital platform and magazine. They guide us through what happened to slow EU regulation of the meat industry so dramatically and how it happened. We also trace the influence of European Livestock Voice and speak directly with Andrea Bertaglio too. But how I originally got to know about Andrea, and about his work for big meat, that goes back to Thin and back to a group she works with: Lighthouse Reports. Lighthouse Reports are highly experienced journalists who do investigations. This summer Lighthouse turned its attention to the powerful agricultural lobby in Brussels.
TV voice:A new investigation by Lighthouse Reports has targeted the powerful European farming lobby group Copa-Cogeca, which they say is losing legitimacy, leaving small farmers ...
Thin Lei Win:So this agricultural lobby expose showed how one of Europe's biggest industry groups and the acronym here is Copa Cogeca, is exaggerating their membership. And they're doing so at the expense of smaller producers who actually do want greener and more humane farming.
James Kanter:Following that expose Thin wanted to go deeper into the way farming lobbying is affecting European regulation, and politics. Food after all is Thin's thing. She is passionate about food systems. And she publishes a popular blog on the topic, Thin Inc. She also spent more than a decade as a correspondent with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where she focused mainly on climate and food security. And she is particularly attuned to livestock farming.
Thin Lei Win:So livestock is a really big issue in food systems and a sensitive one, because of emissions because of animal welfare, because of water usage, and of course, because of human health.
James Kanter:And until this year, it looked like big changes were coming to the European livestock sector. The push for change was coming in part from new democratic tools designed to make the EU more responsive to the public, in particular, a European Citizens Initiative. If an initiative gathers more than a million signatures, the European Commission is obliged to consider new laws. And by 2021, an initiative on animal welfare had garnered 1,397,113 signatures. The demand? To end the cage age. That's a buzzy phrase for no longer rearing farmed animals in cramped conditions. In particular, hens, pigs, calves, rabbits and quail. Farmers would be provided with financial support for cage-free farming, and foreign competition would be addressed. The initiative got a very warm reception. A vice president of the European Commission Vera Jourova congratulated the campaign for getting citizens from a record number of EU states involved.
Vera Jourova:Not only have they managed to successfully collect the required 1 million signatures, but they have also managed to do so in a record number of 18 member states. So once again, congratulations.
James Kanter:The European Commissioner for health and food safety, Stella Kyriakides, said there was big backing for the initiative, and not just from citizens and activists.
Stella Kyriakides:I have received letters of support for your initiative from scientists, associations representing farmers, the food industry, and even veterinary students. A number of leading European companies have called for the cage-age farming to be phased out. We can be confident that direct democracy in the European Union is alive and well. And I for one, I'm glad to be part of it.
James Kanter:And Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commissioner for agriculture, said the new approach was entirely reasonable, that it dovetailed with his values, and that it was part of a much needed reset for farming in Europe.
Janusz Wojciechowski:On the one side, we had those small farms disappearing. And in their place you had those huge industrial factories that were getting European money, then something went awry. We want to reverse this process. You have my full support full support from the European Commission to implement this transformation. The Commission promises you to work intensively to put this into legislation.
Thin Lei Win:You know, for a time, it really looked like Europe was ahead in terms of shifting away from the kind of intensive livestock farming that causes environmental destruction that causes pollution, and that causes animal suffering, right? We were going to get an end to cages by 2027.
James Kanter:And that certainly still is what the public wants. A recent Eurobarometer poll showed eight out of 10 respondents across all EU countries favor getting rid of cages. The poll also showed strong support for animal welfare in every socio-demographic category, even among people with difficulties paying bills. But a quick step back here, what is the link between cages, caging farm animals, and the big environmental questions of our time.
Olga Kikou:Cages in a way prop up industrial animal farming.
James Kanter:Olga Kikou is the head of Compassion in World Farming in Brussels. That's the nonprofit group that helped spearhead the citizens initiative to end the use of cages in the EU.
Olga Kikou:And how do they do that? Well, they do that by restricting animals, their movement, they just enable farmers to put as many animals as possible in as little space as possible. And we are talking not just about emissions here, greenhouse emissions. Well, this is just only one of the kind of destructive impacts. We are talking about vast areas of land that are used to grow animal feed, not food for people. We are talking about the waste, all the waste that comes from all these big farms, that has nowhere to go. And this is a cause of also environmental destruction. We're talking about pollution of our rivers, and waterways. So there are many, many issues, which are generated from industrial animal agriculture, and contribute to eventually the destruction of our planet.
Thin Lei Win:You know, having been born and raised in Burma, Myanmar.
James Kanter:Thin Lei Win again, from Lighthouse Reports.
Thin Lei Win:I'll be the first person to admit that access to protein can do wonders for people in poor countries. So I want to emphasize that here we are talking about problems with industrial scale farming.
James Kanter:The scientific argument that farming has to change is well established. So too is the democratic one. The citizens initiative to end the cage age had made history as the first petition on the welfare of farmed animals to be accepted by EU authorities, and it had the backing of scores of environmental and consumer rights and animal protection advocates. But over the course of this year, the campaign faltered. The obstacle? One of the most enduring in EU policymaking. The amenability of the European Commission to big farm lobbying. The Commission's volte face on cages was not announced as such. But in her State of the Union speech in September, Ursula von der Leyen made no mention of animal welfare, let alone ending the cage age. Instead, the commission president was conciliatory and even ingratiating, toward farmers. And her approach delighted her conservative supporters.
Ursula von der Leyen:Today, I'd like to express my appreciation to our farmers. My appreciation, my gratitude that day by day they are always providing food for us. And producing healthy food, of course, is the fundamental ...
James Kanter:She praised farmers for reforms they'd already made. And she suggested that asking anything more would be too much to manage.
Ursula von der Leyen:The new obligations, are all having a growing impact on farmers' work and farmers' incomes, and we must bear this in mind. Many are already working hard towards a more sustainable form of agriculture. We need to work together with the farmers and people working in agriculture to tackle these new challenges. And that's the only way we can secure a supply of food for the future for all of us. So we need more dialogue. We need less polarization.
James Kanter:By October the European Commission was in full retreat. At a hearing at the European Parliament MEPs repeatedly pressed for a deadline to present the animal welfare proposals, including ending cages.
MEP:We had a timeline, let's stick to it and the proposals are ready and they are there ... The regulation that you have been working on for so many years, why do you only mention that is work a work in progress and not to be put forward as regulation. It's a huge betrayal towards the animals and also the farmers across Europe? Yes, but the concrete timeline now, at least end the cages, the citizens are waiting for it.
James Kanter:But no commitment was forthcoming. Instead, one of Mrs. von der Leyen's vice presidents Maros Sefcovic seemed set on burying the initiative in bureaucratic process and obfuscation.
Maros Sefcovic:On animal welfare as I said very comprehensive complex file, we are working on it where we see that we are the most advanced is the is the part of animal welfare which is linked up with with animal transport. We are working on all other files and once we have the clarity about the feasibility, the costs, and I would say all the aspects, which comes together under the umbrella of better regulation, we will of course come in front of you and present the proposals.
James Kanter:Hopes to end the cage age in Europe and to strike a blow against industrial farming and against all of the environmental and health problems that come with it were raised high, but they've been dashed. For now at least. The legislation is on hold. This year's deadline was mostly missed, and further progress on the law was dropped from the European Commission's work programme for next year.
Olga Kikou:I feel very betrayed by the very institutions that we entrusted.
James Kanter:Olga Kikou, the head of Compassion in World Farming in Brussels.
Olga Kikou:This is exactly what the factory farming industry wanted.
James Kanter:The rollback does not only impact animal welfare. This year, industrial farming prevailed across the board. Plans to set emission limits for large scale cattle farms were scrapped. Rules to restore wetlands were mostly gutted from a law on nature restoration. Even a law regulating pesticides was struck down. Farm to Fork is what the EU dubs its strategy for fair and greener agriculture. It's pretty catchy. But much of Farm to Fork's sustainable food system legislation has been sidelined. That's a big win for farms, not so much for what ends up on our forks. And this is where Thin and Lighthouse Reports wondered how much Andrea Bertaglio and European Livestock Voice helped to shape that outcome.
Thin Lei Win:... particularly when it came to animal welfare. But also this entire campaign to continue farming in a way that is not in line with what science or what the public actually wants. So how much influence has a group like European Livestock Voice had? Well, what we already see is how imperative it was for the industry to shut down dissent and import this, you know, American-style playbook.
James Kanter:Let's go back to the conference in Virginia in May where Andrea Bertaglio of Livestock Voice was a featured speaker. It's here that Andrea was exposed to techniques said to be highly impactful when it comes to meat lobbying. In one instance, Andrea interacted with an American public relations pro, Jack Hubbard. Hubbard is part of Berman & Co., a well known PR firm. Well known I should say for its aggressive approach to labor and environmental groups. Here Hubbard is telling the conference how to discredit animal welfare activists. His approach? Implying equivalency between the ruinous problems of industrial farming and allegations against those who are objecting to it. It's an astute if crude communications tactic.
Jack Hubbard:The currency of these groups and the reason they get meetings with legislators, and the reason that they're successful sometimes in their initiatives is because of their reputations. But their reputations are based on lies. So we need to be creating more and more materials, putting them out there educating the public, educating lawmakers, educating the media, about who these people really are. And it's time to put them on defense. They should be answering questions, not you. They should have to explain themselves, not you. You are feeding the world, right? So I'm going to show you a video we put online. Just recently, we're going to try to change the debate.
James Kanter:And it's here that Andrea, our journalist turned meat lobbyist, steps in with a comment about how inspired he was by what Hubbard had to say, and about how he wants to bring similar lobbying tactics across the Atlantic and to the heart of the EU.
Andrea Bertaglio:So thanks, first of all very inspiring, incredibly inspiring and and we are going to do something similar possibly in Europe, like your videos, so I'd get in touch with you for sure.
James Kanter:But Andrea knows that Hubbard's brash messaging is going to be a harder sell in Europe than in the US. So Andrea asks Hubbard for his guidance.
Andrea Bertaglio:So if a European is watching this video, the first reaction is, Yeah, but that's just the meat industry doing this propaganda. So how can you let the public perceive such a video, such a message, not as a advertisement of the meat industry?
James Kanter:It wasn't an idle question. Andrea knows the challenges in Europe. He's written a book on the topic, In Defense of Meat. An English version came out this year. But in his response, Hubbard encourages Andrea to go in hard anyway.
Jack Hubbard:You know, we're breaking through. We've got Fox News, The New York Post. So to answer your question, in today's day and age, people can always say, is this valid? Is this credible? But here's the thing, guys, we have the truth on our side.
Thin Lei Win:So I heard all that, and thought, wow. I mean, this conference was convened by the Animal Agricultural Alliance. This is a nonprofit organization that is very closely linked to the American meat and dairy industry. It also monitors the activities of animal welfare groups. And you know, what I think is interesting, is that this presentation at the conference in Virginia was titled, Responding to Animal Rights Extremism.
Andrea Bertaglio:It's purely, merely emotional subject for the people, mostly, animal welfare. So how you treat animals, how animals are in farms, every kind of farms ...
Thin Lei Win:So he was basically equating calls for animal welfare and reduction in the consumption of red meat with extremism, which when you think about it is a very, very politically charged term for a policy, particularly on animal welfare, that many EU bigwigs had already backed.
James Kanter:The livestock sector would have to come out with all of its guns blazing in order to prevail. To prevail over the push to end the cage age, and the push to weaken the grip of industrial farming. Sure enough, the big guns were rolled out. The firepower came from the very top of the farming world. And one of the big ideas was creation of a group called European Livestock Voice. And as Andrea told the audience in Virginia, it would be modeled on work he'd already done in Italy with a group called Carni Sostenibili, sustainable meats.
Andrea Bertaglio:A group of organizations was inspired in Brussels was inspired by what we were doing in Italy, and wanted decided to do to start to do something similar, but on a bigger scale. And that's how the European Livestock Voice was born so you can see 13 members...
James Kanter:Over the course of her investigation into European Livestock Voice, Thin got hold of a strategy document from Copa Cogeca, that big farm lobby in Brussels. One of the messages in that document prepared by the lobby's communications chief was, don't hesitate to join Livestock Voice Initiative. Exclamation mark. During 2021 Pekka Personen, the secretary general of Copa Cogeca, spoke on behalf of European Livestock Voice to an EU news website. And European Livestock Voice also appeared at the website for the Protein Pact, a promotional project run by the North American Meat Institute. Last year, the Meat Institute was called out by DeSmog, a news site that covers misinformation. DeSmog found that the Meat Institute still was questioning the degree to which human activity is responsible for climate change. As for European Livestock Voice, a key aim was bringing on board as many interests as possible, as Andrea explained in Virginia.
Andrea Bertaglio:So in Italy, it's only about meats. The European Livestock Voice, as you can understand by the name, is about all livestock. So you see people from animal health, the fur sector, aquaculture, all the meat industry, animal feed animal feed ingredients, dairy, leather, we have everything inside. Now a 14th is joining, the rabbit meat sector. Will be fun.
James Kanter:Andrea's group was set up to be a powerful vehicle for meat industry interests. It would be focused on influencing public opinion with the ambition of affecting the decision-making process. For a deeper dive into how European Livestock Voice operated, and into the extent of the group's influence, I invited journalist Arthur Neslen to the EU Scream studios. Arthur is a specialist when it comes to industry lobbying. And he too was part of the Lighthouse Reports investigation, and he and I interviewed Andrea together.
Andrea Bertaglio:Hi, morning.
James Kanter:Morning, can you hear us okay?
Andrea Bertaglio:Yes, yes.
James Kanter:Thank you.
Andrea Bertaglio:No thank you for the opportunity, it's always a pleasure ...
James Kanter:What follows is my debrief with Arthur about our interview with Andrea. And here Arthur starts off with a bit more background on European Livestock Voice.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah, European Livestock Voice was set up as an activist style network. It was using tactics borrowed from NGOs like flash mobs, Twitter campaigns and social media organizing. It doesn't have a leadership as such, but it has huge and well-funded backers.
James Kanter:But as Andrea acknowledges, European Livestock Voice isn't on the EU's Transparency Register, the register being this database that lists organizations that try to influence lawmaking and policy. Andrea told us that it's not an organization as such. And because it deals with just a few thousand euros.
Andrea Bertaglio:I know that the European Livestock Voice doesn't appear in the Transparency Register, because it's not an organization or not yet. That's one of the things I also propose to discuss pretty soon, because it's a question of, you know, reliability, credibility. And, and also, I guess it's important from a legal perspective.
James Kanter:So, Arthur, who are these influential and large backers that we were talking about?
Arthur Neslen:There's a number of them. There's Animal Health Europe, which is a kind of umbrella organization for a number of lobby groups. There's FIAP. There's AVEC, particularly, which is the European Poultry Association, which was very active, and this Copa Cogeca, which represents millions of farmers across Europe, and has been involved in lobbying against all kinds of green and environmental and biodiversity initiatives that the Commission has proposed.
James Kanter:And there's another way of thinking about this, right? Basically, big meat is worried.
Arthur Neslen:Well, that's right. Big meat is worried the climate policy is going to mean shrinking its business model. Because plant-based foods have carbon footprints that are between 10 and 50 times lower than animal-based foods. So the industry is increasingly strategizing on how to head off regulation.
James Kanter:And we know what their target for 2023 was because Andrea told the conference in Virginia.
Andrea Bertaglio:This year in particular, we are all focused, in Brussels at least, on the revision of the animal welfare legislation. And you can imagine that is a hot topic, not only for the legislation, but also when it comes to animal rights activism. This
James Kanter:This is one of the key things that we asked Andrea about and our conversation we had with him. In October. Did he lobby on animal welfare to get it killed, or at least postponed? And Andrea kind of ducks and dives a bit?
Arthur Neslen:Yeah he was pretty evasive.
James Kanter:But no, he says he didn't.
Andrea Bertaglio:I'm not in touch with institutions. So I've been dealing with communication projects. I'm just writing articles and interviewing people or working on animation videos as an author, but I'm not in touch with institutions. And that's why I've accepted this job. Because that's not my strength, that's not my expertise, not my job.
James Kanter:So Andrea says no direct lobbying role. And he goes on to say how he doesn't think that European Livestock Voice was created as a branch of Copa Cogeca, this big EU agricultural lobby. And let me say to that, yeah, journalists do genuinely wrestle with the line between activism and journalism.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah. And that's been the case since time immemorial.
James Kanter:Yeah, and plus, we should say that Andrea has been very honest and open about how he's on a journey. He writes in his book that here, I quote, I went from challenging the corporate world, to progressively approaching it. They seem to me the corporate world, they seem to me the only ones capable of seriously and concretely changing things. Andrea also talked to us about how they already are playing their part and want to be part of the solution.
Andrea Bertaglio:The livestock sector is not, what I can tell you now, what I'm seeing that from inside, is not a bunch of climate deniers or sadistic people trying to, to hurt animals and the planet. It's, it's people doing their job, providing us affordable good food. Let's say sounds rhetorical, but it's like that. They are trying to reduce their impacts, because it's, it's also in their interest.
Arthur Neslen:Well, here's how I see it from the materials turned up by the investigation. The hard evidence is a little bit circumstantial, but the groups like Andrea's organization, European Livestock Voice, are connected to, are elbow deep in, this effort to keep livestock lightly regulated.
James Kanter:Maybe take us through a couple of examples of this that that came up in the investigation that really sort of stood out for you.
Arthur Neslen:Sure. I spoke to an EU official who told us that they were receiving so much correspondence from European Livestock Voice and from other organizations like the European Poultry Association, that was going up to the senior levels, and which was then leading to a reaction they were feeling in their work. An extremely negative reaction.
James Kanter:So materials from European livestock voice are circulating.
Arthur Neslen:That's right, there was a press release which was circulated by an official within the European Commission. It then went up and it was repeated according to an EU official by Wolfgang Birtscher, the head of the agricultural wing of the Commission, in making his arguments over this piece of legislation.
James Kanter:And Thin also had some off record talks with officials that shed light here.
Thin Lei Win:So they spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, which just goes to show how sensitive the issue is. One told us that the pressure, European Livestock Voice exerted on scientific advice was troubling. Another told us that European Livestock Voice has been involved in putting, quote, really aggressive pressure unquote, at high levels of the Commission. And that pressure contributed to the debacle that we are seeing over the animal welfare legislation today.
James Kanter:So Thin's conversations show as well, the big bureaucrats were backpedaling on livestock, just as Andrea's organization and big agriculture, we're pressing down hard.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah. And that all kind of suggests that lobby pressure of the kind that came from livestock voices and big agriculture, it's really just more evidence that this lobbying effort, blocked this law from going forwards.
James Kanter:Which is something that Andrea really pushes back
Andrea Bertaglio:I don't see that as a result of surely of on. the European Livestock Voice, because we even didn't ... I mean, we published some articles. I've been around interviewing some farmers, affected by eventually by this revision, but we barely published something about that. So I don't think they like, you know, the lobbying of the livestock sector created the situation, it was a series probably, of delays of the Commission itself, and series of circumstances, which took the Commission to, to put the thing a bit in standby. But surely, if you ask me, I mean, as far as I know, or at least from my point of view, it's not a result of the livestock sector.
James Kanter:Now, we want to look a bit more at the methods here. And science is a really, really interesting place to look at how this world operates.
Arthur Neslen:That's absolutely right. But industry science, this is science from people who are often funded by industry or have relationships with industry. It's has happened before. We've seen it with tobacco. We've seen it with biofuels, we've seen it with the fossil fuel industry. It repeats over and over again, because the tactic works.
James Kanter:Yeah. And as Andrea said, at the Virginia meeting, pushing back against scientists' findings is one of his goals. It's one of his tactics.
Andrea Bertaglio:Personally, I'd like now to make this the next step from defensive ... questioning. I'd like to go to the scientists, also the ones publishing papers against meat, against livestock, and say, Why are you saying that? Data. Facts. So that's the next step. We need to get there.
James Kanter:It's here, Arthur on science where you really sparred with Andrea, when we were talking to him.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah.
James Kanter:And it was sort of fascinating to see. In one instance, Andrea takes aim at the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, for initially reporting levels of emissions from livestock greater than global transport emissions. And he then segues into talking about eating meat on flights.
Andrea Bertaglio:Pay attention, because the elephant in the room are fossil fuels. So it's not livestock. Because when you think that livestock according to FAO, again, it's 14.5% of the emissions in the world. And then if you go specificly in Italy, according to the Environmental Agency, it's 5%. What are we talking about? Why are we putting some so much energy and effort on this when the real problem is the energy sector, is the transport, is the I mean, why are we convinced that if I take many planes, but I choose my veggie menu on the plane, I'm saving the climate?
Arthur Neslen:So here he's really mixing things up in a way that's meant to wrong foot the listener. I mean, first off, how can you take an airplane and complain about the beef they're giving you to eat on it. As for the science, airplane emissions are about two to 3% of the global total. And with ambient forcing, you can argue 5% of emissions, but that's still a lot less than livestock, which make up about 14 and a half percent of global emissions at least.
James Kanter:Yeah, 14.5%. I mean, that's still a really, really big figure, even if the numbers are being updated and you know, they may change as the science evolves.
Arthur Neslen:To me, he was trying to minimize the impact of his sector.
James Kanter:As Arthur explains, the use of science has long been a controversial part of industry lobbying. And we'll come back to Arthur in a moment. But here we make a segue, to hear from another journalist, Silvia Lazzaris, about the use of science by the meat sector, specifically. Silvia heads editorial strategy for Food Unfolded, which is a digital platform and magazine that is funded by an EU body, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
Silvia Lazzaris:We want to see where the science is at. But at the same time, the landscape is incredibly muddled by a lot of conflict of interest in research.
James Kanter:Silvia's journalistic curiosity had been stirred by the way the meat industry relies on a so called Dublin Declaration to support its claims.
Silvia Lazzaris:Actually the Dublin Declaration had already aroused some scrutiny from the world of journalism. For example, there had been an investigation by Unearthed, the Greenpeace investigation team, that was then published by The Guardian, which looked at all of the authors of the declaration revealing that almost all the authors had a affiliation, to the meat industry. So that was already interesting for us to look at. But we wanted to check what was the deal with all of the other signatories.
James Kanter:The large number of signatories to the Dublin Declaration also is one of the talking points used by Andrea Bertaglio of European Livestock Voice.
Andrea Bertaglio:And I highly recommend you to follow the, the group of scientists of the so called the Dublin Declaration. Nearly 1,000 scientists who have signed, independent, nothing to do with the, with the livestock industry. They signed this declaration stating that, like, the importance of livestock, for society, and for the environment.
James Kanter:So Silvia joined forces with Lighthouse Reports to take an even closer look at the credentials of those 1,000 signatories.
Silvia Lazzaris:Yeah, it was a lot of work. It's a lot of work, especially because we created a methodology that was quite fine grained, so we didn't want to just catch any sort of link, we wanted to check recent links around the time that they signed the declaration. And we had to look at research, we had to look at different kinds of affiliations that they might have with the industry. So our preliminary findings are that among all of the signatories, around 60% have ties with the meat industry. With affiliations we mean that the research has received funding by industry over the past few years, that they held positions, such as chair, advisor, consultants, or any other influential role within meat industry associations. At the same time, 30% of signatories have backgrounds that are other than environmental science or human health science. So many of them are actually for example, veterinarians who do research on animal farming. And to us it's a little bit like if a gastroenterologist gave you a diagnosis on your heart or your brain instead of a cardiologist or neurologist, you know, you're a scientist, but it doesn't mean that you have necessarily the expertise to talk about a particular topic, such as the impact of meat production on the environment and climate.
James Kanter:So, Arthur, there's one more thing that's really interesting about all of this, right?
Arthur Neslen:Yeah, I know, you're gonna say, the culture war.
James Kanter:Exactly. It's like, I mean, for me, it's like Andrea is sort of the shape of things to come in Brussels, or that, to some degree are already here. So, so often his messages use arguments about values, moral codes, and lifestyles. He says, girls often see animals as too cuddly. They think nature is like cartoons is what Andrea said.
Andrea Bertaglio:Because you see the cartoons, and the dog is in the pig is, is driving the car and you think again, the humanization that the dog, the pig is like yourself and you cannot eat it.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah he was also saying that children were exposed to a propaganda which is connecting meat consumption climate environment, in a way that makes children feel guilty, constantly guilty and uncomfortable.
Andrea Bertaglio:Let me let me use the term propaganda, which is connecting and defining, don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it's not right, but meat consumption and climate and the environment in a way that makes children feel constantly guilty and uncomfortable. And I see that also in my kids.
James Kanter:Yeah that's right. He says that girl's health and development is being harmed when they emulate Greta Thunberg's eating habits. I mean, another one of these things that struck me Arthur is that he suggests there's a kind of decadence in animal welfare, kind of the same thing that it, well it's kind of the same way Pope Francis says pets can be a bad thing. One of his talking points is that people in cities are totally out of touch with farms and meat and the way that the countryside operates. So it's no surprise that the countryside is going rightwards, politically.
Andrea Bertaglio:I'm from the environmental world and they I've never been a right-wing person. But I'm not surprised if many people are turning right, let's say now, because when you feel abandoned by the institutions that your reactions can be the wrong, let's say.
Arthur Neslen:For someone who said he didn't want to polarize the debate, it is strange that he would try to play off rural areas against cities like that.
James Kanter:These these are sort of polarizing debates, aren't they? And that's what culture war rhetoric can often be aimed at.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah you whip up the troops, you aim at the wallet and you aim at the stomach. I think it takes a long conversation, it'll need a long conversation.
James Kanter:Yeah and food is an interesting one. All right. That aside, there is so much I found so much in this animal welfare story, this attempt at a form of direct democracy in the EU in this case to end the cage age through this European Citizens Initiative, how that was very well supported publicly and within the EU institutions. But how that's nonetheless been undermined by lobbying, some of it connected to very aggressive US-style tactics, and this cavalier attitude to science, and how all of that means that European farmers aren't playing the role that they could, in transitioning us to a world where our farms emit fewer greenhouse gases and play a stronger role in the green transition.
Arthur Neslen:Yeah, we have to remember that 89% of people in the last EU Barometer survey said that they supported this legislation, but in the end, their voices counted for less than the money that was lined up against them. It's a sad, but maybe salutary story of where we're at now.
James Kanter:Arthur sums things up pretty well. But there's a bit more to what enabled the farm lobby to be quite so successful this year. Success that remember not only killed off animal welfare, but also gutted so much of the so-called Farm to Fork strategy. In other words, this story needed a coda, a bit more of a conclusion about why the stars align the way they did for farmers. So I asked Olga at Compassion in World farming to assess what had gone wrong. She acknowledged that a number of factors had been at work, factors that importantly, the farm lobby could play on as its campaign unfolded.
Olga Kikou:Higher prices was one. The war in Ukraine was another. So-called food insecurity was another concern that they brought up. They kept seeing what was happening around us. And they kept using every opportunity to bring objections to the proposal.
James Kanter:Foreign trade provided another toehold for opposition to animal welfare. EU officials started to fret that a cage ban might even get in the way of a flagship trade agreement with South America.
Olga Kikou:The Mercosur agreement comes to mind here. Yes, we know that DG Trade kept insisting and kept basically objecting. But we know now that Mercosur actually didn't come about for many reasons. And we know very well that the EU has upheld standards in other areas in terms of trade. But in this case, the Commission president chose not to.
James Kanter:Ultimately, says Olga, the EU's decision to kill animal welfare came down to calculations that were nakedly political, calculations by conservative forces at the pinnacle of the EU's power structure, forces whose dominance in EU decision making is threatened and whose strategy to hold on to power after the next round of EU elections in June, involves shoring up old alliances, as well as making new ones. That includes farmers and their allies, often among the hard right.
Olga Kikou:We have seen the rise of right-wing parties, but also we have seen the rise of parties by the farmers. So in an effort for conservative parties to maintain power and to have as many voters as possible, they tried to cater to the asks of certain farming lobbies and farming parties that are present all over Europe.
James Kanter:Olga says a similar logic, the logic of caucusing for votes and support, also pushed European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to put animal welfare in the deep freeze.
Olga Kikou:Of course, the Commission president first needs to be nominated in her country. And there are various forces there. There is also opposition there. So, of course, in order to secure the vote of Germany, of the country, she chose to listen to those voices who don't want to bring change.
Thin Lei Win:Yeah. So on the politics of this, what we heard was that the political pressure brought to bear was intense.
James Kanter:Thin Lei Win again from Lighthouse Reports.
Thin Lei Win:Tilly Metz, who's a Green member of the European Parliament, told our investigation that she heard that the animal welfare proposals had been on the desk of the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. But, and here's a quote from Tilly Metz, the European Commission president, she keeps them and by them, she means the animal welfare proposals, in order to please the more conservative in her own group, who are closely linked to movements on European livestock and Copa Cogeca, you know, this big agricultural lobby in Brussels.
James Kanter:Whatever the precise reasons animal welfare was sidelined, advocates know that a historic opportunity may have been missed. The next European Commission could be even more sympathetic to industrial farming, and prospects for getting legislation ending the cage age onto the EU law books now could stretch into the next decade.
Olga Kikou:We need to of course, do our best and try again for the next term. But you never know. We are talking about now going into the 2030s and on and let's see what happens.
James Kanter:That has outraged advocates who, after all, gathered 1.4 million signatures for a European Citizens Initiative, and won pledges from EU officials that the measure would be put in place. So now Olga says there's momentum building to take the matter to the EU's highest tribunal in Luxembourg. Such a lawsuit says Olga also would be historic since it would mark the first time the European Commission's handling of a European Citizens Initiative is tested at the European Court of Justice.
Olga Kikou:We expect the European Commission to take you know their own tools that they put in place to take them seriously. And so this takes us far beyond animal welfare. It's a democracy issue.
James Kanter:A spokesman for the European Commission's Agriculture Department strongly rebutted this suggestion that its head Wolfgang Birtscher relied on a European Livestock Voice press release for internal policy purposes. The spokesman added that Farm to Fork policies were set not just by Mr. Birtscher's department, but also by the Commission Secretariat by President von der Leyen herself and by her cabinet. The Lighthouse Reports investigation sent two emails to European Livestock Voice asking for comment, and they responded in a few short paragraphs. Livestock Voice said partner associations each provide between 1,000 and 5,000 euros annually by way of funding. But Livestock Voice did not address questions around their lobbying tactics, or about Andrea Bertaglio's comments at the conference in Virginia. In a follow up, Livestock Voice emphasized that it is, quote, a communications platform and as an entity does not engage on a policy level, unquote. However, Lighthouse obtained correspondence and minutes showing how European Livestock Voice had requested and was granted a meeting in April 2021 with Frans Timmermans. Timmermans was at the time the executive vice president of the European Commission. In addition, a Freedom of Information request showed a European Livestock Voice delegation meeting with the European Food Safety Authority. At that meeting, Livestock Voice gave a presentation about the welfare of pigs and chickens for meat production. EU Scream's nonprofit journalism is made possible by listener donations, partnerships, and by advertising, and we're grateful to the Laura Kinsella Foundation for an annual grant. For more details and for more EU Scream, visit euscream.com. I'm James Kanter. Thanks for listening