13 Years After Green Blahblahblah, Cargill Still Buying Corn & Soy From Clearcutting Farm In Brazil
A major supplier of animal feed is still buying soya and corn from a farm linked to deforestation in the Amazon, despite having pledged to clean up its global supply chains. Cargill, a giant agricultural multinational that sells feed to British chicken farms, buys crops from a farm growing soybeans on deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon.
An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Greenpeace Unearthed, Repórter Brasil and Ecostorm uncovered Cargill’s links with the Brazilian supplier farm, Fazenda Conquista.
The farm in the Brazilian Amazon was responsible for eight sq km of deforestation since 2013, with multiple forest fires recorded in 2020. Its trading with Cargill includes supplying soya, and the farm has signed a deal to deliver 5,700 tonnes of corn to the company this year. It is not known whether the crops in question were grown on a recently deforested part of the farm.
The findings raise questions about Cargill’s due diligence process. The company has pledged not to buy soya beans from land deforested in the Amazon after 2008, and last year committed to moving faster to eliminate “commodity-driven deforestation”. But Cargill has also been repeatedly linked to deforestation. In 2020, the Bureau and Unearthed reported 800 sq km of deforestation and 12,000 fires since 2015 on land used by Cargill soya suppliers in the Cerrado, another protected biome in Brazil. The company exports thousands of tonnes of Brazilian soya to the UK each year for use in animal feed. Campaigners said the findings highlighted the hidden environmental costs of cheap meat.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/14/feed-supplier-to-uk-farm-animals-still-linked-to-amazon-deforestation
