Brazil Banned Foie Gras. Why Hasn’t Britain?

Brazil has become the first country in the world to ban both the production and sale of foie gras nationwide.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed the new law on the 23rd July, after Brazil’s Congress approved the legislation unanimously. The country joins around 20 others that have already banned foie gras production, but goes considerably further by stopping the sale of the product too.

It is a remarkably simple position.

If producing something is so cruel that you believe nobody in your country should be allowed to do it, why should businesses be allowed to pay someone elsewhere to do it instead?

Foie gras is produced by force-feeding ducks and geese until their livers become abnormally enlarged. Somehow, turning this suffering into an expensive pâté has allowed the industry to hide behind words like “tradition”, “culture” and “culinary heritage”.

France certainly thinks so.

French diplomats reportedly pressured Lula to veto the Brazilian legislation after it passed Congress. The argument, according to a Brazilian diplomat quoted by Reuters, was that French production does not constitute cruelty and that foie gras is a cultural issue.

Brazil was not convinced.

Its domestic foie gras industry is tiny, meaning the ban on sales will primarily stop imports from France. That makes this more than a symbolic prohibition on a practice that barely happens within Brazil. The country has refused to simply outsource the cruelty. Britain could learn something from that.

Foie gras production has been illegal in the UK for nearly two decades, but importing and selling foie gras remains legal. In other words, we have effectively decided that force-feeding ducks and geese is unacceptable when it happens here, but perfectly acceptable when somebody else does it for us.

That contradiction is increasingly difficult to defend. According to Humane World for Animals, 77% of UK voters support banning foie gras and other animal products produced using methods already outlawed here. Campaigners have been pushing the Government to finally close the loophole. Labour is reportedly considering abandoning its manifesto commitment to ban foie gras and fur imports in an attempt to avoid friction with the EU.

Meanwhile, France and China produced more than 27,000 tonnes of foie gras in 2025, potentially involving as many as 70 million birds. Brazil has shown that governments do not have to accept cruelty simply because another country calls it tradition.

Britain already decided foie gras production was too cruel to permit. Now it needs to stop paying other countries to do it instead.