AUTHORS: Axel Godfroy, Krystyna Springer, Elisabet Nadeu, David Baldock, Melanie Muro
The focus of this review is placed on four interrelated issues: 1) the climate and land use footprint of the livestock sector; 2) the interactions between livestock systems, land management and biodiversity; 3) achieving EU strategic autonomy; and 4) the role of consumption shifts for transforming the livestock and protein sectors.
The EU Livestock Strategy (LS) and Protein Action Plan (PAP), published in July 2026, mark a first attempt by the European Commission to present a coherent vision for the future of livestock and protein production in the EU. Taking forward the direction set in the 2025 Vision for Agriculture and Food, both initiatives are framed around strengthening the sector’s resilience, competitiveness, and contributing to food security, while reducing strategic dependencies on imported protein feed.
The PAP and LS identify a range of relevant challenges faced by both the sectors concerned (e.g. reduction in GHG emissions, dependency on imported feed, maintenance of permanent grassland), and they contain a number of constructive initiatives. However, by not confronting the competition and necessary trade-offs between objectives, the two initiatives struggle to define a coherent trajectory to guide the long-term evolution of these sectors or to place them within the wider sustainability and public health challenges.
Consequently, the hierarchy of solutions established in both documents is not designed to enable the deep transformation needed to address many of the most pressing challenges faced by this critical segment of the EU agri-food sector, whether climate mitigation, the environmental footprint of the livestock sector, pressure on land and water, or long-term viability and increased strategic autonomy. An important opportunity has been missed at a time when a longer-term perspective and appreciation of scientific evidence is very much required.
Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
