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Pigs can help to save Brazilian forests and savannah, Cambridge researchers say. By feeding the animals leftovers, we can help to protect the environment. However, the European Union will first need to lift its ban on pigswill-feeding, according to sciencedirect.

The EU had banned the feed in 2002, when a U.K. farmer had fed uncooked food waste to his pigs, which led to the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), which was a highly contagious viral disease among wild and domestic animals. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, however, said by "heat-treating" food waste, it can transform leftovers into pig feed, which would save 1.8 million hectares of land from excess grain and soybean-based pig feed production, said a news release.

"Following the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, different countries looked at the same situation, the same evidence, and came to opposite conclusions for policy," Erasmus zu Ermgassen, study leader from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, explained. "In many countries in East Asia we have a working model for the safe use of food waste as pig feed. It is a highly regulated and closely monitored system that recycles food waste and produces low-cost pig feed with a low environmental impact."

Environmentalists explain that recycling 102.5 million tons of food waste in the EU each year would help to save the environment. They estimate that 21.5 million tons of pork, or 34 kilograms of pork per person, are annually produced in the EU, while 75 percent of agricultural land is occupied by livestock. Most of the grain is produced to feed the animals, with EU pork alone using 1.2 million hectares of land across South America for soybean.

"Pigs are omnivorous animals; in the wild they would eat anything they could forage for, from vegetable matter to other animal carcasses, and they have been fed food waste since they were domesticated by humans 10,000 years ago. Swill actually provides a more traditional diet for pigs than the grain-based feed currently used in modern EU systems," zu Ermgassen added in the university's release. "A recent survey found that 25% of smallholder farmers in the UK admit to illegally feeding uncooked food waste to their pigs, so the fact is that the current ban is not particularly safe from a disease-outbreak perspective. Feeding uncooked food waste is dangerous because pigs can catch diseases from raw meat, but a system supporting the regulated use of heat-treated swill does not have the same risks."

The study was published in the journal Food Policy.