Animal

The overuse of antibiotics on farm animals is rife in some of the key countries with which the UK is hoping to strike a post-Brexit trade deal, a new report shows, raising fears that future deals will jeopardise public health and British farming. The US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all allow farmers to feed antibiotics routinely to livestock to make them grow faster, and in the US and Canada farm antibiotic use is about five times the level in the UK, data compiled by the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics shows.

Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has surged to its highest level since 2008, the country’s space agency (Inpe) reports. A total of 11,088 sq km (4,281 sq miles) of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020. This is a 9.5% increase from the previous year. The Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming. Scientists say it has suffered losses at an accelerated rate since Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019. The Brazilian president has encouraged agriculture and mining activities in the world’s largest rainforest.

FT commodities correspondent Emiko Terazono explains how even before the pandemic meat consumption was showing signs of having peaked in developed countries. Demand in China, which accounts for almost a third of the total meat eaten, could also slow considerably over the next decade.

In Denmark, all the farmed minks in the country — some 17 million of them — have been destroyed after mutant coronavirus strains were detected in animals on many farms. Spillover — the transmission of animal disease to people — happens all the time. But the far greater threat to human health doesn’t come from spillovers in the wild. It comes from the way we farm and market animals. You have to ask yourself, when will we learn?

Supermarkets and fast food outlets are selling chicken fed on imported soya linked to thousands of forest fires and at least 300 sq miles (800 sq km) of tree clearance in the Brazilian Cerrado, a joint cross-border investigation has revealed. Tesco, Lidl, Asda, McDonald’s, Nando’s and other high street retailers all source chicken fed on soya supplied by trading behemoth Cargill, the US’s second largest private company.