Target: Ajay Banga, President of World Bank Group
Goal: Halt financial support for industrial farming that undermines efforts to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.
The planet’s top banking agency is under fire for funding projects that are detrimental to the planet. The World Bank is apparently making massive investments in industrial factory farming, such as multi-story “hog hotel” farms in China. These initiatives are not only harmful to the environment but to animal welfare as well.
The International Finance Corporation, a private sector investment wing of the World Bank, has reportedly funneled over one-and-a-half billion dollars into industrial farming over a six-year timespan. Industries that have benefited range from India’s poultry trade to Brazil’s deforestation-driving soy and corn production. Aside from the long-standing animal cruelty concerns within big agribusiness, these industries are also likely a major contributor to harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
Major conservation groups have already joined to petition the World Bank president to divest from industrial farming investments. Sign the petition below to join in these calls for urgent reform.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Mr. Banga,
The World Bank has listed fighting the climate crisis, animal cruelty, and global food insecurity among its most pressing priorities. Yet as multiple conservation groups have already informed you, the International Finance Corporation’s billion-plus dollar underwriting of industrial agriculture is taking aim at all of these stated pledges. Funding entities like the Louis Dreyfus Company and the Yangxiang Group in their widespread and mass exploitation of livestock is not only giving a silent nod of approval to animal cruelty but also funding forces that scientists increasingly believe are throwing fuel on the fire of the climate crisis.
Moreover, the inordinate amounts of feed required to sustain these large-scale productions are depriving starving populations of sustenance from which they could be benefitting. Please take the appeals for reform to heart and phase out funding and tacit support of the behemoths that are undermining the security and future of the very world enshrined in this institution’s name.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: Environmental Protection Agency
The World Bank should be embarrassed, and humiliated. People lost respect for them, I know I did. People lie but when the World Bank makes statements but then goes back on those statements, people ask why should they trust the World Bank? I don’t trust them, not what they say or how they make statements on how things need to run in order to make the world better for all people. That’s a lie too, I’m sure. A new motto for us in dating with the World Bank is … “Don’t tell me, show me!”