BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union will step up efforts to control wildlife trading and make factory farming more sustainable, given that both issues have played a role in the coronavirus pandemic, the bloc’s environment chief said on Thursday.

“Healthy ecosystems lead to a healthy society and therefore it is not too high a price to pay to fix them,” Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius told Reuters in a telephone interview.

While the source of the COVID-19 disease caused by the coronavirus is unknown, the World Health Organization has said the virus most probably has its “ecological reservoir” in bats.

China, where the virus was first identified in the central city of Wuhan, recently banned the trade of wild animals in response to the crisis, but the question of the origin of the virus has become a highly charged one in Western capitals.

Sinkevicius said…