A document five years in the making
On 7 July 2026 the European Commission presented the Livestock Strategy, the first comprehensive strategy dedicated to the European livestock sector, together with the Protein Action Plan for the Union’s protein self-sufficiency. The package arrives at a time of strong pressure on the sector — which, according to Commission data, employs around seven million people and generates 400 billion euros in annual turnover — amid profitability crises, animal disease outbreaks and international competition.
It must be said right away, so the document can be read through the right lens: the Strategy is first and foremost an act of economic and agricultural policy, built around competitiveness, resilience and food security. Animal welfare is not its main objective. Yet the text contains a series of significant commitments — in some passages even more favourable to animals than the drafts circulating in the preceding weeks — that open up concrete spaces for action by civil society organisations.
For those working in animal law, however, the date that matters is another one: 30 June 2021, the day the Commission formally responded to the European Citizens’ Initiative End the Cage Age — 1.4 million certified signatures, collected by a coalition of 170 organisations coordinated by Compassion in World Farming — committing to present legislative proposals to phase out cages in livestock farming. That commitment remained a dead letter: the proposal announced for late 2023 was never presented, and the overall revision of animal welfare legislation was reduced to the sole transport regulation, still under discussion. The Livestock Strategy is therefore, first of all, the document with which the Commission tries to mend the rift with over a million European citizens who were left unheard.
What the Strategy provides for: five priorities
The Strategy is structured around five areas of intervention.
Crisis preparedness. New risk-management tools to reduce farmers’ exposure and speed up recovery after adverse events, with strengthened prevention, early detection and rapid response to animal diseases — including a significant openness to vaccination as an alternative to mass culling in disease control.
Competitiveness in the EU and globally. Support for profitability and innovation, access to credit and — significantly — a commitment to explore how finance can facilitate the transition to cage-free systems. The principle of reciprocity in trade also appears: imported products will have to meet requirements equivalent to those imposed on European producers.
Sustainability. This is the chapter containing the animal welfare measures: targeted revisions of legislation on laying hens, broiler chickens and pigs, “based on concrete data and accompanied by appropriate transition periods and financial support.” On the climate front, the Strategy promises harmonised methods for calculating emissions at farm level and mitigation practices — but, as we will see, no binding reduction target.
Adaptability for all farms and regions. A plan with Member States to bring sustainable livestock production back to vulnerable areas and a roadmap for low-capacity and mobile slaughterhouses, a measure that, if implemented, would reduce the transport times of live animals to slaughter.
Excellence. Strengthening of origin labelling and quality schemes, with a system recognising “European excellence” in production, in which high animal welfare is explicitly listed among the qualifying characteristics.
Alongside the Strategy, the Protein Action Plan aims to raise the share of oilseeds and protein crops for feed produced within the Union from 25% (2025 figure) to 35% by 2035, while also recognising the importance of diets rich in plant-based proteins.
The animal welfare chapter: dates, at last — but with a precise scope
The most significant novelty for animal protection lies in the timeline, which for the first time is set out in black and white in an official document. The calendar is as follows: by the end of 2026, a proposal to revise welfare rules for laying hens and broiler chickens; by the second quarter of 2027, a proposal on pig welfare, including the transition away from gestation and farrowing crates.
These revisions will also include measures to end the systematic killing of male chicks in the egg supply chain — a practice affecting hundreds of millions of animals a year in Europe, already banned in Germany and France and also banned in Italy from the end of 2026 — which the Commission intends to address in the revision of the rules on laying hens, while also considering action on labelling in parallel. Completing the picture is the introduction of equivalent welfare requirements for imported products, safeguarding both “the ethical expectations of Union citizens” and a level playing field for European producers. Finally, it is worth noting the Strategy’s reference to the effective enforcement of existing rules as a response to citizens’ concerns: an important acknowledgement, because enforcement — as ALI has documented for years at national level too — is the weak link of the entire animal protection framework.
The Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare, Olivér Várhelyi, defended the choice: “Today we strengthen Europe’s ability to prevent and respond to animal diseases, while supporting stricter animal welfare rules and reinforcing the resilience of the livestock sector.”
But it is essential to read the exact scope of these commitments. The revision announced for laying hens and broiler chickens is limited to three aspects: cages, welfare indicators and import requirements. It is not the overall modernisation of the legislation promised in 2021, and it leaves out issues that science has long identified as central for broiler chickens: fast-growing breeds, selected to the point of the animals’ physiological collapse, stocking densities, environmental enrichment, lameness, the practice of thinning (the progressive partial depopulation of sheds), and mutilations. As for the follow-up to the End the Cage Age ECI, the Strategy uses a phrase worth flagging: the phase-out of cages will proceed in sectors where the transition is considered “feasible” and “evidence-based.” This is a reservation clause that could be invoked, tomorrow, to leave out some of the species covered by the initiative. And after the 2027 proposal on pigs, the timeline stops: no commitment beyond that date.
The End the Cage Age coalition — which on 7 July held a demonstration in Rome, in Piazza Santi Apostoli, with a delegation that also included Animal Law Italia alongside CIWF Italia, ENPA, Essere Animali, Humane World for Animals Italia, LAV, Legambiente and LNDC Animal Protection — acknowledged the value of this step forward: if the proposals are indeed presented, they will affect over 160 million animals every year. But it also recalled that the commitment made in 2021 covers all species farmed in cages: rabbits, quails, ducks, geese, calves. For these, the Strategy sets no deadline.
The legal reading: what a strategy is really worth
The gap between political announcement and legal obligation is the very ground on which the End the Cage Age saga has already run aground once.
The Livestock Strategy is a Commission communication: an atypical, non-binding act that expresses a political direction but creates neither rights nor obligations. The dates indicated — end of 2026 for hens and chickens, second quarter of 2027 for pigs — are not legal deadlines, but programmatic commitments. Formally, nothing would prevent the Commission from postponing them again, as already happened with the 2021 commitment, whose deadline (proposals by 2023, cage phase-out from 2027) passed without institutional consequences. The difference this time is that the commitments have a political visibility they never had before: they are written into a strategy adopted by the College, with verifiable dates, and can be treated as deliverables against which the Commission can be held accountable, before the European Parliament and public opinion.
There is also a technical question that is far from secondary: which instrument the Commission intends to use. For broiler chickens there is a dedicated directive (2007/43/EC), for laying hens Directive 1999/74/EC, for pigs Directive 2008/120/EC: it remains to be seen whether the Commission will reopen the individual acts, merge them into a single regulation, or choose another route. This is not a detail for lawyers only: the instrument chosen determines the room for manoeuvre in negotiations, transposition timelines, and uniformity of application across Member States.
Secondly, even once presented, the proposals will have to go through the ordinary legislative procedure: the European Parliament and the Council will be able to amend them, water them down, extend the transitional periods. The experience of the regulation on the transport of live animals, proposed in December 2023 and still under negotiation, counsels caution about the actual timing of entry into force.
Third point, of opposite sign: the choice to anchor the revisions to the scientific evidence base is not a minor detail. EFSA’s opinions on the welfare of laying hens, broiler chickens and pigs, published between 2022 and 2023 at the Commission’s request, already recommend abandoning cages and reducing stocking densities. On this front, the technical-scientific basis for ambitious proposals exists and is solid: any backsliding — including a restrictive interpretation of the “feasibility” clause — will be a political choice, not a matter of evidentiary necessity.
Finally, the principle of reciprocity on imports deserves attention. What is contained in the Strategy is probably the strongest political commitment the EU has ever made on applying equivalent welfare requirements to imported products, explicitly linked to future legislation, citizens’ expectations and fair competition. Extending welfare requirements to imported products raises questions of compatibility with WTO law, but recent case law and practice — from so-called mirror clauses to national bans on products from caged animals — show that measures grounded in consumers’ ethical concerns can be defended, if well designed. The critical point will be the concrete definition of the scope: which products, which requirements, how to verify equivalence — especially for welfare indicators, whose measurement outside the EU presents obvious practical difficulties. This will be an important test, not least to prevent animal welfare from remaining a competitive cost borne solely by European producers.
Who pays for the transition
One credit that must be given to the Strategy is its frank admission that improving animal welfare requires substantial investment. The document commits the Commission to exploring a range of tools: subsidised loans from the European Investment Bank dedicated to the transition to cage-free systems, possible specific financial instruments for livestock farming, Horizon Europe research funds for animal welfare innovation, CAP resources, supply-chain agreements that reward higher standards, and private finance mechanisms.
This is a serious basis to work on, but the criteria for accessing funds are not defined, and this is where a decisive battle will be fought. Experience teaches that funding for the “modernisation” of farms can produce two opposite outcomes: supporting a genuine transformation, or entrenching intensive systems for decades to come — the very systems it claims to want to overcome. To prevent this, public funding must be conditional on measurable welfare outcomes, verified through animal-based indicators, and the CAP must reward the transition to high-welfare systems, not the mere replacement of a cage with an intensive indoor barn.
Welfare as a market argument: opportunity and trap
There is a paradigm shift running through the whole document that deserves reflection: animal welfare is no longer presented as a constraint, but as a component of European competitiveness — a factor of consumer trust, product quality, “excellence.” With this in mind, the Strategy proposes to develop, on the basis of the CMO regulation, optional reserved terms, quality schemes and promotion measures that give market recognition to high-welfare production, including cage-free systems.
This is a politically valuable shift, because it embeds animal welfare at the heart of agricultural policy rather than confining it to a separate ethical chapter. But it carries a double risk. The first: if the justification for welfare measures becomes primarily economic, protections that do not produce immediate market benefits — and there are many — become harder to defend. The second: quality schemes with voluntary, undefined criteria open the door to welfare washing, the use of reassuring labels to mask standards that remain substantially unchanged. Here consumer law offers tools — from rules on unfair commercial practices to truthfulness requirements for voluntary claims — that will need careful monitoring. It is striking, and not in a good way, that the Strategy contains no proposal for mandatory method-of-farming labelling, nor any serious use of public procurement as a lever to steer demand towards high-welfare production: two tools that would have given substance to the rhetoric of excellence.
Live animal exports: a first admission
One passage of the Strategy is set to carry more weight in the coming years than its cautious wording suggests: for the first time in an official document, the Commission acknowledges that the export of live animals to third countries for slaughter raises animal welfare concerns, and commits to exploring possible alternatives. At the press conference, Commissioner Várhelyi went further, noting that the Commission should not wait for the conclusion of the negotiations on the transport regulation to start assessing solutions in which exporting meat becomes more advantageous than exporting animals.
The value of this admission is above all argumentative: once the problem is officially recognised, inaction becomes harder to justify. The limits, however, are clear: the commitment is conditional on consultation with stakeholders and on safeguarding the market position of European producers, it does not envisage a ban on exports for slaughter, nor does it extend the reflection to animals exported for breeding or fattening, whose transport raises identical problems. It is an opening that civil society must widen and turn into a real turning point.
Mobile and local slaughterhouses: a good roadmap, but watch the thresholds
The roadmap for low-capacity and mobile slaughterhouses is among the document’s most concrete measures: bringing slaughter closer to the places of farming means reducing transport times — one of the main sources of suffering — and improving conditions at the time of killing, with a positive emphasis on digital traceability. It should also be noted that the text expressly recalls the need to maintain animal health and food safety standards.
Two aspects, however, call for vigilance. The first: the implementing details — funding and regulatory simplifications — are not defined, and every “simplification” of controls at the slaughter stage must be scrutinised rigorously, because that is where animal protection safeguards are actually tested. The second: the Commission is considering raising the production threshold that defines “low-capacity” slaughterhouses, with two public consultations already open on ante– and post-mortem inspection arrangements in these establishments. Widening the category means extending lighter-touch control regimes to larger establishments: a technical point with potentially serious consequences, which ALI will follow closely in the consultation process.
What is missing
The overall assessment cannot stop at the chapter on cages. The Strategy is reticent or silent on points that civil society considers essential.
Other species and the rest of the reform. No timeline for rabbits, quails, ducks, geese and calves, nor for the overall modernisation of animal welfare legislation, still anchored in its framework to Directive 98/58/EC. Eurogroup for Animals, through its CEO Reineke Hameleers, has called for “more concrete plans for the other sentient beings still awaiting greater protection.”
Demand, beyond supply. The Strategy’s whole framework is oriented entirely towards production: there is no reflection on reducing the consumption of animal-based products, no promotion of sustainable diets, no real support for protein diversification — and even the Protein Action Plan, despite its references to plant-based proteins, remains mainly a plan for animal feed.
The climate. This is the front on which the Strategy draws the harshest criticism. The European Environmental Bureau describes it as a document “stuck in the past,” that “defends the status quo” and adopts the industry narrative on the supposedly special characteristics of “biogenic” methane, without setting any binding emissions reduction target for the sector. Everything is staked on monitoring and technological solutions — from calculation methodologies to reproductive biotechnologies, to the valorisation of by-products and manure in the circular bioeconomy — with a constant emphasis on maintaining production levels. Technologies whose benefits, moreover, are in several cases overstated compared to their actual performance.
The underlying model. The Strategy does not address the industrial concentration of the sector, nor the question — central to any credible transition — of reducing the number of animals farmed. Even the welcome recognition of the value of extensive systems for biodiversity, rural communities and land stewardship coexists with the goal of boosting livestock production in marginal regions: without clear criteria, the result risks being an increase in the number of animals farmed, rather than a priority for extensive and genuinely sustainable systems.
Conclusions: an opportunity to be defended, not a finish line
The Livestock Strategy marks an undeniable change in tone: after years of silence and delay, the Commission has put its commitment on cages in writing again and, for the first time, backed it with dates — in a political climate that, it must be said, did not make even this a foregone conclusion. For over 160 million hens and sows, the difference between this document and its implementation is the difference between a life in a cage and a life outside one.
But the very history of End the Cage Age teaches that announcements are not enough. The Strategy is not law, its dates are not deadlines, the scope of the revisions has already been narrowed, and the “feasibility” clause offers a ready-made way out. The task of civil society — and of organisations that, like Animal Law Italia, hold the legal ground — is to treat these commitments for what they have become: verifiable objectives, with dates and content, against which the Commission can be held to account. Concretely: to ensure that the proposal on laying hens and broiler chickens really arrives by the end of 2026 and the one on pigs by mid-2027, with content matching the EFSA opinions; to fight for import requirements and transition funding criteria to be defined rigorously; and to keep open the question of all the forgotten species, because the 2021 commitment covered every caged animal, none excluded.