Categories Newsflash

Forest Cover 58 – newsletter from the Global Forest Coalition

First published on 05/28/2019

Global Forest Coalition, Member of the ICCA Consortium released its May newsletter on international forest policy. This issue focuses on large scale cattle farming and its consequences for forests, agroecology and biodiversity:

Forest Cover 58

This issue focuses on large-scale cattle farming and its incompatibility with other, more sustainable food systems and with thriving, healthy forests. Case studies from six countries describe the impacts of an industrial livestock industry that is hungry for land and resources, often highly polluting, and squeezing or stamping out other models of food production, such as traditional farming and agroecology.

Globally, the impacts of the international trade in beef make it the biggest culprit in deforestation, since forests and other ecosystems are cleared to make way for cattle pastures. Further, the industrial animal feedstock sector, which turns forests and other lands into vast expanses of monoculture genetically-modified crops to feed factory farmed animals (including cows) have enormous consequences.

The climate and biodiversity crises our planet faces desperately call for practices like agroecology and small-scale, peasant farming to provide communities with food security, to build climate resilience, and to protect and restore biodiverse ecosystems. However, big agribusiness, particularly large-scale livestock farming, is in direct conflict with these aims. It is time for a transformation in global food production and consumption; the planet, its people, and other species require nothing less.

Forest Cover, the Global Forest Coalition’s magazine provides a space for environmental justice activists from across the world to present their views on international forest-related policies.