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Home » Cargill adds value-added meat company. Cargill Value Added Meats Retail names new president. Cargill adds Colombian poultry company. Consumers continue demand for value-added meats. But contrary to its view of itself as a leader, it usually comes in dead last. It has remained a laggard across multiple industries, trailing peers like Louis Dreyfus and Wilmar.
Cargill today has greater influence than even many governments over the fate of our world. Despite repeated and highly publicized promises to the contrary, Cargill has continued to bulldoze ancient ecosystems as it can within the bounds of the law — and, too often, outside of those bounds as well. With the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — who has promised to open Indigenous lands and other protected areas to unrestricted exploitation — Cargill presents a clear and present danger to some of the most vital ecosystems on Earth.
Like any other nation, Brazil has the right to the leaders it chooses. But, so too do the customers of Cargill have a right to insist on corporate policies that protect the environment and human rights. Those customers must act decisively and quickly. Cargill silo in Bolivia. Cargill drives global problems at a scale that dwarfs their closest competitors. Photo: Jim Wickens, Ecostorm. Aerial photo that shows the boundary between intact forests with already cleared for palm oil in Papua.
The flow of soy through the meat supply chain. Soy originates from farms in Latin America and ends up in the fast food consumed around the world. Until now, Brazil has been a leader in the battle against climate change. Since the mids, the nation has been committed to ambitious programs to curb deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil impressively cut deforestation by two-thirds from its peak, all while doubling its agricultural production by focusing expansion on degraded lands.
But the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President in could end that worthy legacy. He has told agribusiness companies that he will roll back existing laws and give industry free rein. Not only has the government signaled its intentions to stop enforcing existing environmental laws, it has even created a new agency to review and forgive previous violations. Unsurprisingly, deforestation of the Amazon has risen to its highest level in a decade.
I am afraid of a gold rush to see who arrives first. They will know that, if they occupy illegally, the authorities will be complacent and will grant concordance. They will be certain that nobody will bother them. Cargill has stated its support for this coalition. But after the summit ended and applause died down, Cargill dropped the ball. And then they stomped on it. Since the signing of the Declaration, Cargill has continued to drive the destruction of pristine landscapes, remaining one of the worst actors on the world stage, and one of the greatest threats to native ecosystems across the globe.
It is time for those customers to stop aiding and abetting Cargill by buying and selling their products. More than 1. Yet, each year an average of 13 million hectares of forest disappear, often with devastating impacts on communities and Indigenous Peoples.
The conversion of forests for the production of commodities — such as soy, palm oil, beef, and paper — accounts for roughly half of global deforestation…. Forests represent one of the largest, most cost-effective climate solutions available today. Action to conserve, sustainably manage and restore forests can contribute to economic growth, poverty alleviation, rule of law, food security, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation.
More than one million square kilometers of the planet have been cleared of their natural vegetation to grow soy, one of the primary ingredients of animal feed used to raise meat. Deforestation for soy production accelerates climate change through the release of carbon, destroys wildlife habitat, and disrupts hydrological cycles, limiting the availability of water.
It showed that Cargill was one of the two largest customers of industrial scale deforestation. In addition to their role in creating a market for deforestation-based soy, we found that Cargill finances land-clearing operations deep in virgin forest, building silos and roads, then buying and shipping grain to the US, China, and Europe to feed chickens, pigs, and cows. After our report was covered in publications around the world, including The New York Times, The Guardian, CTV, Le Monde and others, major consumer companies, investors, and governments urged Cargill to uphold its commitments to end deforestation in Latin America.
Months later, we conducted satellite monitoring of the sites we had originally visited. Given the scrutiny to which Cargill had been exposed, and their commitments to their customers, we assumed that they would launch intensive efforts to stop deforestation at least in these locations. In contrast, we found that Cargill was still driving deforestation at some of the same sites we had first visited, despite the scrutiny. Between Cargill and their doppelganger Bunge, they had cleared the equivalent of 10, foortball fields for soy.
Indigenous Peoples who depend on forests have been forced off of their traditional lands, had their land encroached upon by soy plantations, have experienced sharp increases in cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and other illnesses linked to pesticides and herbicides used to grow soy.
In the one place where Cargill was forced to change, the company managed to both protect ecosystems and grow its businesses. In the two years before the agreement, nearly a third of the new soy plantations in the Brazilian Amazon came from forest destruction. After the agreement, that number dropped to around one percent.
Meanwhile, the soy industry still managed to grow at a tremendous pace. Even as deforestation plummeted, the area planted with soy in the Brazilian Amazon more than tripled. Expansion without deforestation is possible.
When forced to, Cargill and others shifted their focus onto previously deforested lands, and more efficient agricultural practices. But Cargill has refused, and instead used its influence with trade associations to block its more responsible competitors from expanding these protections.
Outside of the Amazon, Cargill does not protect any rainforest in the eight other Amazonian countries. Nor does it protect other forests and prairies outside Brazil like the Gran Chaco of Argentina, and Paraguay. And finally, it does not protect critical ecological areas within Brazil but outside the Amazon, like the magnificent Brazilian Cerrado.
Roughly the size of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain combined, it is home to one out of every twenty species on Earth, including the giant anteater, giant armadillo, jaguar, maned wolf, and hundreds of bird species — as well as more than 10, species of plants, nearly half of which are found nowhere else on Earth.
But over the past decade, more than 4, square miles per year have been converted to plantations — twice the rate seen in the s. When tropical forests are cut down and burned, their stored carbon is immediately released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, generating one-tenth of all global warming emissions. There are more than a billion acres of already-degraded land in Latin America that could be used to expand agriculture, and there is no reason other than corporate inertia to continue to destroy these priceless landscapes.
It is one of the largest remaining continuous tracts of native vegetation in South America, second in size only to the Amazon rainforest. Once the impenetrable stronghold of creatures like the screaming hairy armadillo, the jaguar, and the giant anteater, Cargill has infiltrated these frontiers, bulldozing and burning to make way for vast fields of genetically modified soy. In , a Mighty Earth field team visited soy plantations across the Gran Chaco ecosystem and documented extensive destruction of natural ecosystems, some of it illegal and some under the guise of legality.
We tracked the soy from recently cleared forests to the ports where Cargill ships it around the world. The tragedy of the destruction we documented is that it is entirely avoidable.
While meat is inherently resource-intensive to produce, it does not require the destruction of native ecosystems. Latin America contains an area of previously degraded land larger than half the continental United States where soy and cattle can be raised without threatening native ecosystems. The Amazon, which acts as an essential carbon sink for the world in order to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere covers nearly 60 percent of Brazil.
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