Campaigners descend on Parliament in 'rainforest food' protest

The demonstration is timed to highlight the second reading of the Sustainable Livestock Bill, which is due to take place this Friday, November 12.

Robert Flello’s Bill calls on the Government to adopt policies, as part of a wider strategy, that encourage farmers to use home-grown feed for their livestock and allow them to graze outdoors where possible.

This is in response to claims that importing large quantities of soy for animal feed from Brazil last year is ‘destroying’ the Brazilian rainforest

Mr Flello, MP for Stoke on Trent South, and FoE, will hand in a petition to Defra, urging it to back the Bill. FoE said more than 55,000 people had signed up to its MOOvement for rainforest-free food’.

One hundred MPs must attend the second reading and vote for the Sustainable Livestock Bill on Friday for it to stand a chance of becoming a law. FoE is calling on people who sign up to the campaign to ask their MP to vote for the Bill.

Mr Flello said: “The Sustainable Livestock Bill gives us a real chance to stop harmful farming practices trashing our planet and support British farmers to use home-grown feed.

FoE executive director Andy Atkins said: “We need to feed our animals on home-grown feed and let them graze outdoors instead of packing them into factories and stuffing them full of feed grown by destroying rainforests.”

The NFU said the Bill, while ‘admirable’, had failed to take on board the work already being undertaken to improve the sustainability of British livestock farming.

NFU President Peter Kendall said: “First and foremost this Bill represents policy aspiration, not law. I believe the UK government, present or future, should be free to develop its policy on the sustainability of the food and farming sector, working in partnership with industry and other interested organisations, as it sees fit. While the aspirations of this Bill are admirable, they are unsuited to legislation,” he said.

He added that  voluntary and industry-led initiatives represented a better approach to addressing issues surrounding the sustainability of livestock farming.

“Under a variety of schemes including the Greenhouse Gas Action Plan, the Beef and Sheep Roadmap, and the encouragement of sustainable soya production in Brazil through the FEMAS, GHG emissions from the whole of the agricultural sector, including livestock, have already been reduced by more than 20 per cent between 1990 and 2008,” he said.

He accused ‘some organisations’ of making ‘disingenuous claims that the Bill will achieve things that are completely absent from its provisions’, such as a ban on large dairies, an enforced reduction in meat and dairy in people’s diets, and the erection of trade barriers on imported animal feed.

 “There must be a question as to whether these organisations are seeking to hijack the Bill for their own ends,” said Mr Kendall.

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