Improving global food security while maintaining or improving animal welfare requires careful analysis of trade-offs and synergies in different food system contexts.
Global food security and animal welfare are often framed as competing goals, but this framing obscures important nuances. At global scale, a shift toward plant-dominant diets would simultaneously improve food security (more people fed per unit of land) and animal welfare (fewer animals in industrial systems). However, livestock play complex roles in local food security for the world's poorest communities that cannot be dismissed by aggregate analysis. Improving working animal welfare in smallholder farming directly improves food security by maintaining the productive capacity of animals that cannot be replaced. Context-sensitive analysis distinguishes where welfare and food security genuinely conflict from where they align.