World Bank Failed to Uphold Own Climate Rules for $2bn of Animal Agriculture Loans – New Analysis Reveals

For immediate release:
April 21, 2025

Contacts:
Jon Date, Di:ga Communications, +44 (0)7533 011983
Dr. Divya Narain, +91 9630085755

• Loans help to greenwash polluting companies and are a colossal waste of public finance, warn civil society groups.
• IFC should use its upcoming Performance Standards review to tighten its climate lending policies and ensure stricter enforcement of them. 
  

The World Bank’s private sector arm, International Finance Corporation (IFC), has repeatedly failed to ensure that its agribusiness borrowers comply with IFC’s own lending requirements around climate, reveals a new report by Stop Financing Factory Farming (S3F), a global civil society coalition. Of the 38 loans worth approximately US$2 billion that IFC provided to industrial meat, dairy and feed corporations from March 2020 – March 2025, none appeared to meet all of the climate requirements set out in IFC’s Performance Standards and other key policy documents.

Researchers reviewed IFC loan documents and publicly available company reports to look for evidence that the companies adhered to IFC requirements. Across the 38 loans:

• Zero companies reported adherence to IFC’s requirement to address (i.e., adapt to) physical climate risks.
• Just five companies (13%) set out quantitatively how they have or would reduce their emissions intensity to lower than national average or reduce absolute emissions, despite such reductions being required. 24 companies (63%) demonstrated zero adherence to IFC’s emission reduction requirements.
• 26 companies (68%) reported Scope 1 and 2 emissions as required. However, only one company set a Paris-aligned reduction target for their Scope 3 emissions, and zero companies reported disaggregated (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) Scope 1-3 emissions. Addressing Scope 3 emissions from agricultural operations and methane from livestock are critical for keeping the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach. 
  

Dr. Divya Narain, food systems finance researcher and co-author of the report, said: “Animal agriculture is responsible for at least a sixth of global greenhouse gas emissions, including a third of all methane, and is a key driver of tropical deforestation. Channelling billions into such a high-emitting industry is jeopardizing our chances to stay within relatively safe global warming limits.”

Ashley Schaeffer Yildiz, Programme Manager at Friends of the Earth US, said: “IFC is seriously undermining the World Bank Group’s climate commitments. By having environmental policies it doesn’t properly enforce, IFC is helping to greenwash the polluting companies it lends to. These loans are a colossal waste of public finance at a time when money is tight. Hundreds of activists attending 13 events across 5 continents will protest the World Bank Group’s continued failure to tackle climate change during a global day of action on 24th April.”

IFC is expected to announce a review of its Performance Standards on Environment and Social Sustainability, which were last updated in 2012. In the meantime, IFC continues to approve new harmful animal agriculture projects that fail to adhere to IFC’s lending policies. In December 2024 IFC approved a US$40 million loan to build a soybean crushing plant in Bangladesh, used to mass-produce animal feed. Cultivating the soybeans will require an estimated 354,000 hectares of land annually, and will be sourced from Brazil and Argentina where soy production is associated with destruction of sensitive ecosystems. IFC previously provided loans to support multi-storey pig farms in China and to expand factory farms in an area of Ecuador home to Indigenous peoples and tropical forest.

Dr. Narain continued: “IFC should use its upcoming Performance Review to rule out any further support for industrial livestock expansion. It should also tighten their financing criteria – including requiring companies it lends to to report and make absolute reductions to Scope 1-3 emissions, especially to methane – and ensure they actually adhere to them.”

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Stop Financing Factory Farming (S3F) is a coalition of more than 25 human rights, environmental and animal protection organizations calling for public development banks to stop funding industrial livestock production and shift their investments towards ecological farming systems that put communities first and protect the planet. It is led by: Bank Information Center, Compassion in World Farming, Friends of the Earth US, Global Forest Coalition, International Accountability Project, Sinergia Animal and World Animal Protection.