Reacción a "Extensive livestock has declined in regions such as Europe, and this has ecological consequences, according to a study"

The grazing of large domestic herbivores on a global scale is essential for the provision of ecosystem services that are vital to our survival. This indisputable fact has led to 2026 being recognised by the FAO as the International Year of Pastures and Shepherds. Like all human activities, the way in which grazing is carried out quantitatively defines the level of provision or, in the worst cases, the shortage of these services. It is common to find conflicting scientific results, depending on which services are analysed or even on the level of detail or impartiality of the analysis.

This last aspect is addressed at the outset of this interesting study, highlighting the bias in the scientific literature of the last two decades towards analysing the negative effects of overgrazing, leaving almost untouched the possible effects of the abandonment of grazing, an increasingly common trend in many marginal areas of the world's most economically developed countries.

The study highlights that the evolution of grazing pressure in the current century, analysed at the level of the 18 major regions of the Earth considered by the FAO, is positively correlated with population pressure and negatively correlated with the consumption of pork and chicken produced under intensive conditions. Thus, in the economically poorest regions, with higher population growth and lower levels of technification, grazing pressure has increased, while the opposite has occurred in the richest regions, presumably due to the abandonment of large marginal areas. This is also consistent with the significant positive correlation noted between the evolution of grazing pressure and the proportion of cereal production devoted to human consumption (vs. that devoted to animal feed). The strong demand for other crops, especially soybeans, by intensive monogastric livestock farming and the excess of animal protein in the diet of people in developed countries, although not noted in the study, only serve to deepen these obvious imbalances.

Spain falls within the FAO region known as Southern Europe, which, according to the study, ranks third in terms of the greatest decline in grazing pressure since the beginning of the century. The study provides recent references demonstrating the relationship between the decline in grazing and the increase in the frequency of destructive fires, something that is evident in many studies on a more detailed scale in our Mediterranean ecosystems and which, unfortunately, we suffered painfully in years such as 2025.

The study highlights in a simple way and on a global scale aspects of great relevance to the importance of achieving a balance between grazing pressure and pasture productivity, territories that occupy a quarter of the planet's land surface. The imbalance towards the abandonment of grazing, which is particularly noticeable in the European Union (the four FAO regions with the highest declines in grazing pressure are those covering the EU), requires political measures to halt and even reverse this trend. In the case of the European Union, the Common Agricultural Policy, currently under debate for a new reform that will come into force in 2028, should make a firm commitment to maintaining and restoring the valuable pastoral areas of its member states.