We called on EU lawmakers to put animal welfare at the heart of the EU’s food system transformation, or risk ecological collapse by 2050, at the high-level conference “Welfare of Farm Animals in the EU of 2050 – A Pathway to the Future” organised by the Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU in Brussels. The conference brought together policymakers and experts to shape the future of animal farming in the EU.

Speaking at the panel discussion, Better Market Returns on Welfare Investments hosted by the Danish Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in collaboration with the European Commission, we made it clear that improving animal welfare standards is not only what consumers want, citizens expect, and market trends are already moving towards, it is also fiscally feasible. Farmers and food businesses are already showing the way to a cage-free future, but they need legislative certainty.

Vinciane Patelou, Head of EU at Compassion in World Farming, said:

If we continue with business as usual – cruelly confining animals in factory farms that poison the soil, pollute the water, and threaten local communities and food security – we’ll have little to harvest in 2050.

Take cages: they are a representation of everything that’s broken in our food system. By 2050 they must be a long-forgotten memory. But this is about more than cages: it’s about having ambitious laws and funding to give animals a life worth living while making the foundation of our food system more resilient to safeguard our future.

Avoiding ecological collapse is too big a responsibility to be outsourced to the invisible hand of the market.

Cages must be a “long-forgotten memory” in 2050