TTIP will promote the expansion of industrial meat production, lower standards that protect public health, and undermine governments’ ability to create essential labour, environmental and animal welfare reforms in the future. This is the warning of a new report launched by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) Europe, Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft, Compassion in World Farming and PowerShift on July 13, which analyses public negotiating positions, leaked negotiating texts, and industry documents. The report documents how the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) empowers the global meat industry and undermines family farming at a time when civil society is demanding the opposite – meat produced humanely, locally, free of harmful substances and benefiting rather than degrading the environment. The authors warn that TTIP will accelerate corporate concentration and expand industrial meat production or “factory farming” by increasing the power of meat-producing transnational corporations. One of the report's key messages is that liberalizing tariffs will make EU meat products even less competitive, increasing pressure in the EU to adopt even cheaper, industrialised practices that will take a heavy toll on the environment and public health. “A TTIP deal would hand over Europe’s animal farming sector on a silver platter to transnational meat corporations – through tariffs and quota expansions, but definitively through the sweeping de-regulatory changes the industry hopes to win through the accord,” says IATP Europe’s Director and co-author of the report, Shefali Sharma. She argues that TTIP will disincentivise new regulations that seek to discipline the industry’s worse practices, particularly if these rules raise the cost of production. “The U.S. simply lacks essential rules that should curb the industry’s worse practices that cost taxpayers millions in environmental and public health costs. With TTIP, the EU industry will ensure that pending decisions on critical issues such as cloning, glyphosate and factory farms’ methane emissions are made with trade ‘competitiveness’ in mind and not the public interest,” Sharma adds. According to Sharon Treat, lead author and former U.S. state legislator, “the analysis clearly shows that regulatory processes for key issues that the European and American public care about – from climate change, GMOs, country of origin labelling or future rules on technologies such as gene editing – will be affected.” Therefore, TTIP should be recognised for what it is, she argues: “a multi-pronged strategy promoted by global agribusiness concerns on both sides of the Atlantic that will establish an ongoing mechanism for deregulation and meat industry consolidation.” The report concludes that TTIP is undemocratic; the policies it promotes are unsustainable; and that it must be rejected by anyone who cares about good food and farming, human and animal rights and the future of our planet. (ab)