Study: Global Banks Boost Sustainable Animal Farming, Tripling Investment to $244M in 2024

Despite a sharp drop in global financial support for factory farming last year, industrial animal agriculture still drew in five times more funding than its sustainable counterparts.

According to a new report, international banks cut their backing for factory-farmed meat nearly in half in 2024. Yet even with that steep reduction, funding for more sustainable farming models remained minimal by comparison.

The findings come from Stop Financing Factory Farming, a coalition of 25 organisations spanning climate action, human rights, and animal welfare. Their analysis examined data from the Early Warning System, which monitors public finance projects through institutional disclosure websites.

The results? Multilateral finance institutions, including the World Bank Group, the European Investment Bank, and the US Development Finance Corporation, collectively reduced their funding of industrial meat and dairy from $2.27 billion in 2023 to $1.23 billion in 2024. That’s a 46% drop.

Encouragingly, investment in more sustainable livestock systems grew significantly, more than tripling from $77 million to $244 million. Still, these more responsible models only captured about one-fifth of the total funds that factory farming received.

The analysis looked at the entire chain: from livestock production and animal feed to slaughterhouses and processing plants. Projects deemed factory farming either referenced or implied support for high-intensity, large-scale operations, facilities often associated with environmental harm, biodiversity loss, pollution, land degradation, and serious animal welfare concerns.

In contrast, the “sustainable” category included smallholder and extensive farming, low-impact models like backyard poultry, and responses to food insecurity.

Overall, total investment in meat and dairy dropped from $3.3 billion to $2.3 billion, a 31% fall. Yet within that, the share of funding going to factory farms grew, climbing from 68% to 75%. The share going to non-industrial projects also rose, from 2% to 10%, but still lags far behind.

Some institutions shifted more than others. The European Investment Bank made the biggest cut, slashing its factory farming investments by 64% to $154 million. Meanwhile, the Inter-American Development Bank supported the most sustainable projects, funding seven of them with a total of $112 million.

But the World Bank Group once again stood out, for the wrong reasons. Despite pledging climate leadership, it funnelled $650 million into industrial animal agriculture in 2024. That’s a modest 13% drop from the year before, yet it still accounted for over half of all factory farming finance included in the report.

One standout example: the IFC, the Bank’s private sector arm, provided a $40 million loan for a soybean crushing facility in Bangladesh, intended to produce animal feed on a massive scale. Critics argue that this kind of support contradicts the Bank’s own research and climate pledges.

The contradiction is hard to ignore. The World Bank itself has acknowledged that agriculture is responsible for roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock alone accounting for nearly 60% of that footprint.

Even so, the institution is sending mixed signals. It estimates that low-emission agriculture could deliver $4.3 trillion in health, economic, and environmental benefits, an impressive 16-to-1 return on investment. It has also advised governments to redirect subsidies away from livestock and toward climate-friendly alternatives like plant-based or cultivated proteins.

Looking ahead, the Bank says it plans to double its agriculture-related spending to $9 billion a year by 2030, with an emphasis on empowering smallholder farmers. And as of July 1, the IFC has committed to ensuring that all new investments align with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Still, for many critics, the real test will be whether global finance institutions finally turn their pledges into concrete action, and whether they can truly shift away from a model of industrial farming that’s long overdue for change.