Bankrolling the Butchers: The role of UK banks in financing industrial meat and dairy corporations

some of the largest UK banks’ financing to the industrial livestock sector and issues a call to action for them to stop • Barclays and HSBC between them provided $4.9 bankrolling the mass production of meat and dairy in light billion to US-based multinational Cargill over the of its outsize climate, social and environmental impacts. [...] As the joint owner of Avara Foods, one tackling the expansion of industrial livestock production, of the largest suppliers of chicken and turkey to including through reform to the current subsidy regime, UK supermarkets and restaurants, Cargill bears and regulation of the private finance system, which are significant responsibility for pollution in the Wye both key factors in the sector’s rapid gr. [...] Bankrolling the Butchers: The role of UK banks in financing industrial meat and dairy corporations 7 INTRODUCTION Barclays and HSBC headquarters, Canary Wharf, London • Credit: Feedback Global The UK is one of the world’s leading financial centres and its financial services sector is often presented as the engine of the national economy4. [...] 12 Bankrolling the Butchers: The role of UK banks in financing industrial meat and dairy corporations Keeping bad company: UK banks’ ties to industrial meat corporations CARGILL AND THE RIVER WYE The Wye, a river running from mid-Wales to the Severn estuary, is experiencing a pollution and biodiversity crisis primarily due to manure and other waste runoff from livestock farms in the area seeping i. [...] The industrial livestock companies financed by UK banks affect people all over the world – and this includes people in the UK who are suffering as a result of the poisoning of our air, soils and waters, damage to our health, and the acceleration of the climate crisis.