More than 80% of payments from the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are intended directly or indirectly for livestock farming. Food systems represent nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
“We have shown that the CAP disproportionately supports meat products to the detriment of plant production,” indicates the lead author of the study, Anniek Kortleve, from the Dutch University of Leiden. The study focuses on 2013, the last year when all the analyzed data is available, but "little has changed" in their distribution until 2020.