{"id":25583,"date":"2026-07-13T21:49:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/the-eu-recognizes-that-sheep-and-goats-are-key-to-preventing-fires-and-conserving-biodiversity\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T21:49:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:49:16","slug":"the-eu-recognizes-that-sheep-and-goats-are-key-to-preventing-fires-and-conserving-biodiversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/the-eu-recognizes-that-sheep-and-goats-are-key-to-preventing-fires-and-conserving-biodiversity\/","title":{"rendered":"The EU recognizes that sheep and goats are key to preventing fires and conserving biodiversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The European Commission has taken an important step in recognizing the role of extensive livestock farming in Europe. The new EU Livestock Strategy, presented on July 7, identifies sheep and goat farming as fundamental activities for conserving ecosystems, preventing forest fires, and keeping rural areas alive.<\/p>\n

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The document represents institutional support for a production model that, for decades, has contributed to caring for the land far beyond food production. The Commission expressly recognizes that extensive grazing provides essential environmental services and is indispensable for the conservation of numerous European natural areas.<\/p>\n

A necessary recognition for the sector<\/p>\n

The new Strategy also quantifies the difficult situation facing the sector. In the last twenty years, the European sheep and goat population has decreased by 26%, currently standing at around 54 million sheep and 10 million goats.<\/p>\n

Grazing: The Best Ally Against Wildfires<\/p>\n

One of the most important aspects of the document is the recognition of the role that extensive livestock farming plays in landscape management.<\/p>\n

According to the European Commission itself, approximately 35 million hectares of protected habitats depend on grazing to remain in good condition. The disappearance of this activity favors the accumulation of scrubland, increases the risk of large forest fires, and accelerates the loss of biodiversity.<\/p>\n

For INTEROVIC, this recognition confirms something the sector has been advocating for years: livestock not only produce quality food, but also generate environmental and social benefits that impact all of society.<\/p>\n

“That the European Commission has finally recognized the strategic role of sheep and goats is excellent news. Now the challenge is for that recognition to translate into measures that allow farms to remain viable and ensure generational renewal in the sector,” says Ra\u00fal Mu\u00f1iz, president of INTEROVIC.<\/p>\n

An accurate diagnosis with few immediate solutions<\/p>\n

Although the Strategy provides a very precise analysis of the sector’s situation, INTEROVIC believes that the proposed measures are still insufficient to reverse the decline in extensive livestock farming.<\/p>\n

The document outlines more than thirty actions focused on studies, roadmaps, and support tools, but it does not include concrete mechanisms to guarantee adequate remuneration for the environmental services provided by livestock farmers.<\/p>\n

An opportunity to build a stronger livestock sector<\/p>\n

INTEROVIC welcomes the fact that, for the first time, the Commission has positioned extensive livestock farming as part of the solution to some of Europe’s major challenges, such as climate change adaptation, fire prevention, biodiversity conservation, and territorial cohesion.<\/p>\n

The sector now hopes that this institutional recognition will translate into policies capable of guaranteeing the continuity of thousands of family farms that keep rural Europe, and especially Spain, alive. In Spain, more than 250,000 families, most of them located in sparsely populated areas, depend on the sheep and goat sector.<\/p>\n

As Mu\u00f1iz concludes, \u201cWe shouldn’t only remember the sheep and goat sector at certain times of the year, like summer, when the risk of wildfires increases. We should remember it year-round. As we have been saying for years, every time a consumer chooses suckling lamb, lamb, or kid goat meat, they are helping our farmers continue to live in rural areas and maintain extensive livestock farming, which gives back much more to the land than it takes from it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The European Commission has taken an important step in recognizing the role of extensive livestock farming in Europe. The new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25582,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1097,1112,1096],"tags":[1100],"class_list":["post-25583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anafric-en","category-ovino-caprino-en","category-sector-en","tag-anafric-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anafric.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}