Too often, the public is assured that factory farming is the key to securing affordable, reliable food. The truth, however, is starkly different.
Eighty-five percent of the UK’s farmed animals are reared in intensive systems, where sentient beings are reduced to “bits of animal” – fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) sold on supermarket shelves like tins of baked beans.
This model is not only ethically indefensible, but strategically short-sighted for the UK’s food future.
The dependence of factory farms on imported soy is a case in point. Once adjusted for feed imports, the UK is only 41% self-sufficient in pork and 54% in chicken.
Far from delivering resilience, industrial pig and poultry production exposes Britain to global shocks. If soy imports were disrupted, supermarket shelves would empty of nearly half our pork and chicken.
By contrast, investing in home-grown horticulture and alternative proteins could enable the UK to achieve full self-sufficiency in protein, building both resilience and sustainability into our food system.
Egg production demonstrates powerfully why labelling matters. Since the introduction of mandatory method-of-production labelling in 2004, consumers have driven dramatic change.
In 2003, only 31.6% of UK eggs came from cage-free systems; by 2013 this had risen to 55.7%, and by 2023 over two-thirds of eggs sold were cage-free.
Labelling enabled citizens to reject cages and in doing so transformed an entire industry in just two decades. Extending this principle to meat and dairy could deliver similar improvements.
Cage-free eggs rose from 31.6% in 2003 to over two-thirds in 2023 — proof that labelling empowers consumer choice and transforms industries.
Consumers are not demanding more factory farming. On the contrary, polling shows overwhelming support for higher welfare and transparency at the point of sale.
Big agribusiness, however, has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their lobbying employs buzzwords like “food security” to resist reform, while using smoke-and-mirror terms such as “adaptive crates” to disguise practices that are, in essence, cages. Such language obscures reality and undermines consumer trust. Without enforceable labelling, policy risks becoming little more than rhetoric.
Factory farming also undermines long-term food security by fuelling disease outbreaks, polluting rivers, and our environment.
It entrenches reliance on a handful of multinational corporations that own much of the UK’s pig and poultry processing, concentrating power in ways that make the food system more fragile, not less.
Mandatory animal welfare labelling is, therefore, vital. It aligns with public values, strengthens national resilience, and ensures food security is based not on the illusion of cheap, industrial meat, but on a genuinely sustainable farming system. A transparent labelling framework would help steer us towards a food future where fewer animals are farmed and enjoy far better lives.
It would also mean a Britain less dependent on volatile global feed markets and more secure in its ability to feed its people.
Chris Platt is co-founder of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation