Pru Elliott
Investors have power to affect a huge amount of positive change in the world. But there is one move that really can transform the lives of over a billion animals.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become the buzzword for investment firms in recent years, and for good reason. Investors hold immense power over our rapidly changing world, and they can influence whether things change for better, or for worse. But did you know there is a single move that investment firms could make to impact one of the biggest causes of animal suffering on the planet?
In the UK alone, a billion chickens are reared and killed annually for meat production, and we import yet more still. However the vast majority of those chickens are reared in deplorable conditions, and bred to grow so fast they suffer a plethora of debilitating and painful diseases before they reach consumers’ dinner plates.
Major supermarkets, which buy and sell the majority of the UK’s chicken, have known for years that current chicken farming practices are unsustainable, and that the public would reject ‘standard chicken’ if they knew the truth about how it’s produced.
Brands like Morrisons, currently the target of a public-facing campaign on the issue, invest huge sums of money aggressively promoting initiatives that impact relatively small numbers of animals, but quietly let the welfare of the most numerous land animal in their supply chains dwindle pitifully; you could call it ‘welfare washing’.
Rearing chickens for meat is a complex and scientific issue, but animal protection charities across Europe have developed a set of standards known as the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), which offers a practical solution to dramatically improving the lives of chickens raised for meat.
The standards are being rapidly adopted across Europe and North America in a wide range of sectors, and in the Netherlands almost the entire chicken industry has made the switch to comparable standards.
Investment firms are now critically placed with the power to influence supermarkets to adopt the BCC. If they make a move and demand supermarkets adopt the BCC, we could see an industry that is currently responsible for causing incomprehensible quantities of suffering, revolutionised for the better.
With AGM season upon us - and Morrisons’ AGM next in line on June 10th - animal protection charities are poised waiting for action from powerful firms like Schroder, Majedie, BlackRock, Columbia Threadneedle and Vanguard.
__Will these firms put their money where their mouth is? __
