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Council funds linked to factory farming

Local authorities are being urged to divest from industrial livestock companies after it emerged that many councils have pension fund investments in producers linked to environmental damage.

An investigation by the NGOs Feedback and World Animal Protection found UK local authority pension funds hold a total of £238m of investments in industrial livestock companies.

The largest investments are in China Mengnui Dairy (£40.3m), Tyson Foods (£37.7m), WH Group (£26.6m) and Yili Group (£26.2m), while £7.5m is invested in the world’s largest industrial livestock producer, JBS, which has been linked with supplying UK supermarkets and wholesalers with meat from farmers accused of illegal deforestation

Although many local authorities have committed to divest money in pension funds from fossil fuels, the NGOs said that “factory farming is also responsible for deforestation, human rights violations, pollution, pandemic risks and industrial-scale animal cruelty which until now have been overlooked”.

Data obtained via freedom of information requests showed that ten local authority pension funds, including West Midlands, Swansea, Strathclyde, Clwyd and South Yorkshire, hold almost half of total investments in industrial livestock companies, worth £110.6m.

Feedback and World Animal Protection are calling on local authorities to divest money in their pension funds from factory farming. They said the fact that on average only 0.1% of the local authorities’ pension fund investments were in industrial livestock would make it easier for those pension funds to divest.