Reality bites in global animal rights push

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. It’s a saying as old as time itself, but one that Australia’s largest supermarket chains seem to have misinterpreted in an attempt to greenwash their credentials.

In January, an investigation by the Weekly Times revealed that Australia’s biggest food retailers, Woolworths and Coles, had aligned themselves with the global Business Benchmark of Farm Animal Welfare, which analyses the farm animal welfare policies, management systems, reporting and performance of some of the world’s biggest food companies and retailers.

The supermarkets’ strategy was obvious: an attempt to show their shareholders that they were doing the right thing in an important space that can tug at the heartstrings of certain sectors.

Woolworths went as far as stating that it was seeking a Tier 1 “leadership” endorsement from the benchmark by 2025. Coles, to a lesser extent, said in its sustainability report that it was “aspiring to improve our (BBFAW) score”. A good approach if they had done their homework.

As with many things, there was plenty of devil in the detail, with the revelation that the benchmark’s backers – the European-based Compassion in World Farming and Four Paws International – were lobbying to end factory farming and halve the number of animals farmed for food globally by 2040.

The radical ideals of these two groups are centred on animal rights not animal welfare, of which Australian farmers are world leaders. Their agenda is clearly spelled out in black and white in the foreword of a recent BBFAW report, where they describe factory farming as “the biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet” and “a key driver of climate change and the collapse of nature”.

Farmers, who work tirelessly every day to stock their shelves and bolster these retailers’ bottom lines, were left understandably outraged by Woolies’ and Coles’ stance, especially in a time of cost-of-living constraints and with increased pressure to produce the cheapest sources of protein. They rightfully questioned why an overseas animal activist lobby was dictating our approach to farm animal welfare.

Woolworths last week buckled to months of farming industry pressure and severed any ties with the benchmark, saying it “fails to recognise the unique context of Australian farming”.

The problem was the evidence was there all the time, serving as a lesson for all corporates to remove the blindfolds in the race for social points.