In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

A new study shows that if the European Union lifted the pigswill ban imposed following 2001's foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, and harnessed technologies developed in East Asian countries for 'heat-treating' our food waste to safely turn it into pig feed, around 1.8 million hectares of land could be saved from being stripped for grain and soybean-based pig feed production -- including over quarter of a million hectares of Brazilian forest and savannah. 
  
 While swill-feeding was banned across the EU in 2002 following the foot-and-mouth outbreak -- triggered by a UK farmer illegally feeding uncooked food waste to pigs -- other countries, such as Japan, responded by creating a highly regulated system for safely recycling heat-treated food waste as animal feed. 
  
 Researchers describe the EU ban as a 'knee-jerk reaction' that no longer makes sense when East Asian countries have demonstrated that food waste can be safely recycled. The models in the latest study show that pigswill reintroduction would not only decrease the amount of land the EU pork industry requires by 21.5%, but also cut in half the ever-increasing feed costs faced by European pig farmers. 
  
 Researchers describe swill as a feed which is commonly used in other parts of the world, one that could save a huge amount of global resources, and provide an environmentally sound recycling solution to the estimated 102.5 million tonnes of food wasted in the EU each year. Over 35% of food waste is now recycled into animal feed in Japan, where swill-fed 'Eco-pork' is marketed as a premium product. 
  
 "Following the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, different countries looked at the same situation, the same evidence, and came to opposite conclusions for policy," said Erasmus zu Ermgassen from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, who led the study, published today in the journal Food Policy. "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." 
  
 The researchers examined data about the current land use of EU pork, the availability of food waste in the EU, and the quality and quantity of pork produced in feed trials that compared pigswill to grain-based diets, to produce a model of how much land could be saved if the pigswill ban was lifted. 
  
 Some 21.5 million tonnes of pork, around 34kg of pork per person, are produced in the EU each year. Livestock production occupies approximately 75% of agricultural land worldwide -- with most of this used to produce animal feed. For EU pork, much of the environmental burden stems from the farming of soybean meal, which takes up in excess of 1.2 million hectares of land across South America. 
  
 As swill is much cheaper than grain and soybean-based pig feed, reintroducing swill feeding could reduce costs faced by EU pig farmers by 50%, say the researchers. 
  
 Most objection to swill feeding in the EU stems from concerns about safety, and the sentiment that feeding human food waste to pigs is unnatural. But zu Ermgassen argues that those concerns are largely based on incorrect assumptions. 
  
 "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," said zu Ermgassen. 
  
 "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," he said. 
  
 With the demand for meat and dairy products forecast to increase 60% by 2050, reducing the environmental footprint of current systems of meat production will become increasingly critical. 
  
 Zu Ermgassen points out that economic and environmental concern is driving a reassessment of EU animal feed bans that were put in place in the 2000s, as well as attempts to recycle food waste more effectively. The EU is currently looking into repealing bans on using waste pig and poultry products as fish feed and reintroducing insects as pig and poultry feed. 
  
 "The reintroduction of swill feeding in the EU would require backing from pig producers, the public, and policy makers, but it has substantial potential to improve the environmental and economic sustainability of EU pork production. It is time to reassess whether the EU's blanket ban on the use of food waste as feed is the right thing for the pig industry," he said. 
  
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 Erasmus zu Ermgassen's research is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. ||||| After a disease outbreak in pigs was attributed to their diet of "swill," meaning repurposed human food waste, various countries had very different reactions. Japan began a strict policy of heating swill to a safe temperature—pasteurizing, essentially. The UK, and later the entire EU, went the other direction, and simply banned swill altogether. 
  
 For decades across Europe, human food waste (table scraps, that kind of thing) had been recycled into food for pigs. From a 2013 BBC article: “As recently as the 1990s ‘pig bins,’ into which uneaten food was placed, were a familiar sight in schools and canteens across the UK, but all of that changed when the foot-and-mouth crisis hit in 2001.” 
  
 Foot-and-mouth disease is a highly contagious and dangerous virus that hit the UK especially hard in the spring and summer of 2001. Eventually about 10 million animals were killed to stop the spread of the disease, and officials across the world were eager to make sure nothing of that magnitude ever happened again. The cause is generally attributed to unsafe food given to pigs: garbage, basically. Rotting raw meat. 
  
 In 2001, the UK banned swill from being fed to pigs, and the next year the ban became law for the entire EU. There have been protests against the law ever since, and the newest is a study from the University of Cambridge that looks at land use. 
  
 From our partners at VICE 
  
 This might seem like a small issue, but it’s actually a massive deal, with implications as far away as the Amazon basin. Here’s why: Without the ease of feeding pigs recycled human food waste, their food has to come from somewhere else. That means literally millions of hectares of land is dedicated to producing generally cheap, not-all-that-great food for pigs (soybeans, mostly). And big chunks of that land are in the Amazon, where rainforest is routinely plowed to make room for farmland that’s feeding pigs. 
  
 The study finds that if the EU emulates Japan and institutes a heating mandate for pig swill rather than banning it outright, about 1.8 million hectares of land would be saved from stripping and farming, including a quarter of a million hectares in the Amazon. The researchers also point out that recycled food waste is, surprisingly, more of a typical diet for pigs than the grain they’re currently fed: pigs, being scavengers and opportunist omnivores, would normally eat a bit of pretty much everything in the wild. They get that bit of everything with pig swill, but not with their current grain diets. It’s kind of like the difference between grain-fed and grass-fed beef. 
  
 Perhaps even more importantly, without a system to recycle human food waste as pig feed, millions of tons of food go to waste every year. Governments around the world, including our own here in the US, are scrambling to come up with some way to reduce the food waste crisis; wasted food means more land is used to grow unnecessary food and more energy is needed to dispose of it. And why bother with all that when pigs would happily, and healthily, recycle the waste? 
  
 You can read more about the study here. ||||| Livestock production occupies approximately 75% of agricultural land, consumes 35% of the world’s grain, and produces 14.5% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. With demand for meat and dairy products forecast to increase 60% by 2050, there is a pressing need to reduce the footprint of livestock farming. Food wastes have a long history as a source of environmentally benign animal feed, but their inclusion in feed is currently banned in the EU because of disease control concerns. A number of East Asian states have in the last 20 years, however, introduced regulated, centralised systems for safely recycling food wastes into animal feed. This study quantifies the land use savings that could be realised by changing EU legislation to promote the use of food wastes as animal feed and reviews the policy, public, and industry barriers to the use of food waste as feed. Our results suggest that the application of existing technologies could reduce the land use of EU pork (20% of world production) by one fifth, potentially saving 1.8 million hectares of agricultural land. While swill presents a low-cost, low-impact animal feed, widespread adoption would require efforts to address consumer and farmer concerns over food safety and disease control. |||||
After farmers feeding raw and rotting meat to pigs caused a massive outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, the European Union banned the use of swill—or human food waste—for feeding pigs, Modern Farmer reports. This has turned out to be a bad decision for both the environment and the pigs themselves, according to a University of Cambridge study published in Food Policy. A press release on the study states the EU produces 21.5 million tons of pork every year. Since farmers are no longer feeding swill to their pigs, their food has to be grown somewhere—and that somewhere is increasingly the Amazon rainforest. The study estimates returning pigs to a swill-based diet would save 1.8 million hectares of land—250,000 of them in the Amazon. Furthermore, the study found a return to swill would be a boon to the EU pork industry by cutting the land necessary to raise pigs by more than 21% and the cost of feeding them by 50%. And—surprisingly—swill is a more natural diet for pigs than the soybeans and grains they're getting now, Modern Farmer notes. "Pigs are omnivorous animals," the study's lead researcher says in the press release. "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." The study advocates for the EU to follow the lead of East Asian countries, which heat swill until it's safe for pigs to eat. That would also solve the problem of what to do with the human food waste currently piling up. (This woman faces jail because she gave water to thirsty pigs.)