Revealed: EU’s €1.5bn promo scheme backing ‘sustainable’ meat and dairy

The European Commission’s Enjoy, it’s from Europe programme has spent €1.5bn since 2017 on campaigns and events to “raise awareness of the efforts made by European farmers to produce quality products”, which frequently overstates the environmental benefits of eating meat and dairy.

Promoting everything from olive oil to prosciutto to export markets around the world, these campaigns claim to reach millions of consumers, frequently targeting younger generations through online advertising and social media.

Throughout its messaging, the scheme — largely funded by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) scheme — emphasises the “authenticity, safety, sustainability and quality” of EU-farmed food and drinks. 

A new DeSmog investigation, however, finds that the sustainability claims of the advertised produce are often misleading or false, prompting politicians in Brussels to call for an urgent review of the scheme. 

DeSmog found that nearly a third (187) of the 622 campaigns listed on the programme’s website have exclusively promoted meat and dairy products — receiving €384m in EU funding so far. An additional 104 schemes worth more than €232m featured meat and dairy alongside other produce. 

Of these meat and dairy campaigns, 84 worth over €58m relied heavily on ‘sustainability’ to promote their produce. These explicitly cited positive environmental benefits of the products in their funding bids, but failed to clarify whether polluting intensive farming or more sustainable methods were used. 

There were also some outlandish claims which appeared to undermine the scientific consensus on the role intensive agriculture plays in global heating. 

Let’s Talk About Pork – a social media campaign running across Spain, France and Portugal – described emissions from pork-production as “absolutely fake”, while another falsely claimed that European poultry “helps preserve biodiversity”.

Meanwhile, a video-based campaign – which launched in October to promote European beef across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok – dubbed scientific claims about the environmental impact of livestock as “fake news”.

Food systems account for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock is responsible for between 12 and 20 percent of polluting gases. Agriculture generates more than 10 percent of the EU’s entire greenhouse gas emissions. 

With the programme’s budget for 2026 due to be announced in the coming weeks, politicians and experts have warned that the publicly-funded scheme stands in the way of the EU’s own climate policies — which include cutting agricultural emissions in line with its 2050 net zero target.

Delara Burkhardt, a socialist German MEP, called for the commission to “thoroughly review this programme and stop the funding and promotion of misleading environmental claims”.

“This is a gross mishandling of taxpayers' money and actively contributes to misleading consumers,” she told DeSmog.

A spokesperson for the European Research Executive Agency (REA), the body responsible for the programme, said the scheme “enables those sectors or producer groups who are investing in improving their environmental footprint to inform consumers about these actions with the overall aim to increase their competitiveness”. 

“This is a driver for increased investment in environmental and, more broadly, sustainable practices,” they added. 

Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of advocacy group International Panel of Experts on Food, says the programme is in fact helping boost intensive agriculture, rather than investing in environmentally-friendly alternatives.

“The EU certainly needs to be promoting sustainably-produced and healthier foods to its citizens, and supporting family farms and local food markets,” he said.

“Instead, it is promoting meat and dairy exports — sometimes resorting to misleading claims — in yet another bung to industrial livestock production.” 

Telling porkies

DeSmog found that since 2021, 22 of the 84 meat and dairy campaigns citing sustainability were vague or misleading in how they referred to the sector’s environmental and climate impacts.

The pork industry, for example, received funding for at least 19 campaigns over the period reviewed, over half of which contained misleading environmental claims. 

These include the “Let’s Talk about Pork” campaign, which claimed on videos and images shared on Facebook, X, YouTube and Instagram, as well as its campaign website, that it was “absolutely fake” to say pork generates significant greenhouse gas emissions or has a major impact on climate change. 

However, the data used by Interporc, Spain’s primary pork industry lobby group running the campaign, only accounts for on-farm emissions and excludes other sources such as feed production — the primary source of emissions in the industry, making up to 60 percent of the total. The campaign also claimed that pork’s emissions, per kilo of pork, had declined in Spain between 1990 and 2016.

In fact, total methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the sector in Spain have increased since 2012, even when excluding emissions related to feed production. Pork accounts for 14 percent of global livestock emissions when factoring in the impact of feed.

A spokesperson for Inteporc defended its use of figures, saying they were based on “official and publicly available data”.

“These measurements and data evolve over time, as the pork sector is highly committed to continuous improvement in its environmental sustainability practices,” they told DeSmog, “but the source of the data remains constant.”

‘Preserving biodiversity’

The investigation found the campaigns frequently stressed the benefits of dairy without drawing attention to any of the issues related to intensive farming, or the latest scientific advice on dietary requirements.

Dairy production has steadily increased in Europe in recent decades. Around 80 percent of Europe’s milk is now produced through intensive farming, which has been linked to loss of wildlife, soil and water pollution, and poor animal welfare.

“Every time you consume three dairy products a day, you are contributing to making the world a more sustainable place,” reads the campaign website run by Spain’s main dairy industry group InLac, which between 2022 and 2028 won €3.5m to promote “sustainability friendly” dairy in Spain and Belgium. The website adds that the dairy sector "contributes to preserving biodiversity”.

Some studies have shown dairy production can support biodiversity — but only when cows are less intensively-farmed than is the norm in industrial agriculture.

The landmark EAT-Lancet report, published last month by over 70 leading scientists, recommends a plant-rich, flexible diet with an average of just one serving of milk, yoghurt or cheese portions a day. The report also notes that the diets of the richest 30 percent of the global population contributes to more than 70 percent of the environmental pressures from food systems.

The report also notes the disproportionate overconsumption of meat and dairy in Europe and the US compared to other parts of the world.

The climate impacts from dairy farming are also considerable. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas released during livestock digestion, mostly from dairy cows, accounts for nearly half of all agricultural emissions. 

Despite these concerns, more than 20 campaigns for non-organic dairy products reviewed by DeSmog presented the sector as environmentally friendly.

At least five specifically claimed that the industry protects biodiversity or fights climate change, often by highlighting the role of grazing in storing carbon dioxide in the soil, a process known as carbon sequestration.

The effectiveness of this practice has been heavily disputed. A 2023 paper in Nature Communications concluded that soil carbon gains are time-limited and that relying on grassland sequestration to offset the warming from current cattle systems is “not feasible”.

Moreover, studies show grazing land in Europe has shrunk by up to 20 percent over the past decade, especially in Central Europe.

Industry-dominated

Trade organisations and industry groups from a handful of EU countries dominated successful funding bids, DeSmog found. 

In Italy, these groups have secured more than €175m for 75 campaigns promoting meat and dairy, followed closely by France with 73 worth €173m, and Spain with €114m for 47 campaigns, mostly for pork marketing. 

The organisations applying to the programme vary in scope: some represent a single region or product, while others cover entire sectors such as dairy across Europe. 

“A lot of companies will have memberships within these lobby groups,” said Caitlin Smith, senior campaigner at advocacy group Changing Markets Foundation. “They claimed that they're representative of farmers in the EU. And actually, when you ask smaller farmers and some younger farmers, they don't feel represented.” 

Several trade groups appear repeatedly across multiple funding bids. These include the European Milk Forum (EMF), a France-based umbrella group for the dairy sector, which has received funding for at least four campaigns to promote the sustainability of dairy, in partnership with members in Ireland, Belgium and Denmark. 

Sustainable dairy in Europe, a 2020 campaign to promote the sector across six member states, claimed that the industry had taken action to tackle climate change, by cutting its emissions by 11 percent over the past decade. 

One of these campaigns claimed that the European dairy sector is taking action to tackle climate change, saying the industry cut its emissions by 11 percent over the past decade. 

But the FAO report from which that figure was drawn tells a different story: while greenhouse gas emissions per kilogramme of milk fell by nearly 11 percent between 2005 and 2015, total emissions rose by 18 percent as milk production grew by about 30 percent.

In the meat sector, a prominent funding recipient is Italy’s Organizzazione di Produttori Allevatori di Suini (Opas Coop – Pig Breeders Product Organisation) and its “Eat and Think Pink” campaign. 

Since 2020, the group has secured four rounds of EU funding worth nearly €8m to promote pork products in Japan, South Korea, China, the UK, and Canada.

Among its claims, the group claims to have eliminated 2,737 tonnes of CO2 emissions by installing a high-efficiency gas cogeneration plant and offsetting additional emissions through the planting of more than 500 trees, in agreement with the municipality of Carpi. 

According to DeSmog’s calculations, that would offset the emissions from roughly 5,000 pigs – a fraction of the 22,000 pigs processed by Opas every week.

Opas did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.

'Involve influencers'

A number of the campaigns reviewed by DeSmog explicitly set out to influence the dietary choices of young consumers and to buck the trend in decreased consumption of meat and dairy.

For example, the €2m ‘Think Milk, Taste Europe, Be Smart’ campaign across Italy and Germany intended “to involve communicators, influencers, and food bloggers”, as well as targeting “the consumer, who is above all younger (millennials and Gen X), with the aim of changing his perception of dairy products”.

It adds: “In both target countries, the other target group is the consumer, who is above all younger (millennials and Gen X), with the aim of changing his perception of dairy products.”

“The meat and dairy industry is scared of this kind of more knowledgeable younger generation, who really care about not only the climate, but also their health,” says Caitlin Smith of Changing Markets. “That's really clear in the tactics that they use.”

Currently, consumers have limited protection against the marketing practices used in campaigns funded by the programme.

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) defines a misleading action as a commercial practice that “contains false information and is therefore untruthful or in any way, including overall presentation, deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer, even if the information is factually correct.” 

Yet this directive applies only to traders — those directly involved in the commercial exchange, such as companies or consumers — and not to industry lobbies that promote their own products. The same limitation applies to the more recent Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition.

The European Commission proposed the Green Claims Directive in 2023 to address misleading sustainability claims. This legislation aims to ensure that green claims are reliable, comparable, and verifiable across the EU, thereby protecting consumers against greenwashing. 

The proposal explicitly cites intensive agriculture as a potential example of misleading marketing: “For example, a claim on positive impacts from efficient use of resources in intensive agricultural practices may mislead consumers due to trade-offs linked to impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems or animal welfare,” the directive warns. 

Negotiations on the law stalled last June, after the European Commission warned it would withdraw the proposal due to insufficient support from member states.

“By supporting these campaigns, the commission does not live up to its own standards,” socialist MEP Delara Burkhardt, a rapporteur on the directive, told DeSmog. For MEP Delara Burkhardt, the campaigns in Enjoy, It’s from Europe run counter to the aims laid out in the directive.

“In its proposal, the commission itself stressed that in order to make a green claim, a product’s entire life cycle and trade-offs with other environmental objectives on biodiversity, ecosystems and animal welfare need to be considered.”

China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, north America and the UK

A central goal of these campaigns is to boost exports of EU agricultural products, with the majority of campaigns boasting of the superiority of European produce. 

The latest round of funding for campaigns starting in 2026 has earmarked €63.4m for promotions in non-EU countries, compared to €58.6m for the EU market. Priority markets include China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and North America, while the UK remains the EU’s largest single agri-food export market. 

Most of the campaigns aimed at export markets highlight food safety and traceability as the main assets of the European production model, though many also weave in sustainability claims. 

These include two launched in 2022 by Irish food board Bord Bia, promoting “Ireland’s capability as a supplier of high-quality, sustainably produced beef, lamb and dairy” in markets across Japan and Southeast Asia.

This featured a ministerial-led trade mission with an Irish ‘beef taste test project’ where “Japanese consumer[s] uncover perception and enjoyment of grass-fed Irish beef”.

Climate modelling finds that pastured beef production using fertiliser and feed inputs, as is typical of Irish suckler farming, is the least climate-efficient beef system even compared to Brazilian pastured beef.

In 2025, the European Commission funded the campaigns “European Pork for a Greener World” and “Sustainable Beef” — the latter launched on World Environment Day — both designed to showcase livestock farming as a solution to climate and environmental challenges.

Marco Springmann, senior researcher on environment and health at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, says farms in Europe are typically intensive. This can reduce their [carbon] footprint because land-use change is lower, “but that doesn't suddenly make them sustainable,” he told DeSmog.

“Even if emissions were halved (compared to production in other countries), it is still significantly higher than any plant-based food,” he said.

“And if suddenly everybody ate European beef or pork or dairy, there wouldn’t be enough for it to make a meaningful and holistic solution to the health and environmental challenges we have regarding the food system”.

In response to DeSmog’s findings, Anja Hazekamp, who represents the Dutch Party for the Animals in the European Parliament, has submitted a written question to the commission, asking why the EU is funding the marketing of red and processed meat when these products have been “scientifically classified as carcinogenic”. 

“In this era where we are constantly told to eat unhealthy things by private marketing campaigns, we need the EU to focus its publicly-funded campaigns on educating people to make better choices,” Hazekamp told DeSmog.

“The food environment is already very negative in Europe and the European Commission should take its responsibility to protect citizens, animals and our environment seriously,” she said.

This story was published first by De Smoog