Major UK chicken feed supplier Cargill still guilty of funding Amazon destruction - is it any surprise for the ‘world’s worst company’?
BLOG: Cargill - America’s largest privately held company and multinational food conglomerate - has today been revealed to still be supplying UK farms with feed sourced from producers linked to Amazon deforestation, despite promises to clean up its supply chain. But for a multinational dubbed ‘the worst company in the world’ for a litany of reasons, is it really any surprise?
Make no mistake, Cargill is a disgrace. Today’s report in the Guardian of an investigation by several environmental NGOs and investigative press bureaus - which unearthed evidence that Cargill was still buying corn and soya from at least one farm guilty of destroying the Amazon rainforest, was certainly bad enough - but it is just one offence in a long, long list of crimes against animals both human and non-human, and the planet.
So long is this list that the global environmental campaign organisation Mighty Earth dubbed Cargill ‘the worst company in the world’, with the backing of US Congressman Henry A. Waxman who said:
“The people who have been sickened or died from eating contaminated Cargill meat, the child labourers who grow the cocoa Cargill sells for the world’s chocolate, the Midwesterners who drink water polluted by Cargill, the Indigenous People displaced by vast deforestation to make way for Cargill’s animal feed, and the ordinary consumers who’ve paid more to put food on the dinner table because of Cargill’s financial malfeasance - all have felt the impact of this agribusiness giant. Their lives are worse for having come into contact with Cargill.
You can find Mighty Earth’s full report on everything evil about Cargill here, but the investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Greenpeace Unearthed, Repórter Brasil and Ecostorm that made today’s headlines centred on Cargill’s ties with a Brazilian supplier farm, Fazenda Conquista, which has reportedly deforested eight square kilometres of Amazon rainforest since 2013. Several forest fires in the area in 2020 have also been linked to the farm, according to the Guardian.
There is something of a question mark over whether a deal signed to supply Cargill with 5,700 tonnes of corn this year will come from crops grown on recently deforested land belonging to the farm, but with a promise to not buy products of deforestation after 2008 and a commitment to end “commodity-driven deforestation”, Cargill’s word has been cast into serious doubt and not for the first time.
In 2020, the Bureau and Unearthed linked 800 square kilometres of deforestation and 12,000 fires since 2015 to land used by Cargill’s soya suppliers in another protected Brazillian biome, known as the Cerrado. With Cargill exporting thousands of tonnes of Brazillian soy to the UK to be processed into animal feed, both reports reveal the UK’s intensive farming industry to be complicit in the devastation of the Amazon.
“The growing demand for cheap chicken leads to the growing demand for soy, causing large-scale deforestation and devastating environmental degradation, which destroys the natural habitats of millions of wild animals,” Lindsay Duncan, the campaigns manager at World Animal Protection UK, told the Guardian.
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In August 2020, the Daily Telegraph accused vegans of destroying the planet by drinking soya milk, based on a very questionable report by the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT). What the Telegraph and SFT failed to acknowledge was that soya milk isn’t made from soy grown on deforested Amazon land. In fact, as Surge discussed at the time, in both a Debunked article and an entire video about the environmental impact of soya milk, an estimated 96 per cent of South America soya is used for animal feed or cooking oil, and in Brazil, South America’s largest producer and exporter of soya, 90 per cent of the soymeal produced is used as animal feed.
The UK imports somewhere around 3.2 million tons of soya, with around 75 per cent of that estimated to come from South America, but again, we use at least 90 per cent of it as animal feed. And whilst the poultry and pig industries use the most soya, around eight to 10 per cent is used to feed dairy cows.
Claire Hamlett, writing for Surge last year, drilled down even further into the truth behind soya importation and the scale of its ties to UK poultry farming. Between 2011 and 2017, the number of intensive poultry farms (those housing more than 40,000 birds) increased by 27 per cent to nearly 1,500. There are also 575 poultry ‘mega-farms’ - those housing more than 125,000 broiler chickens or 82,000 laying hens. Those chickens are fed largely on soy, and according to the Poultry Site, 60 per cent of imported soy goes to the poultry sector.
The link between the British poultry sector and environmental destruction goes even further. A report from the British Free Range Egg Producers’ Association (BFREPA), unveiled at an online session of the Pig & Poultry Forums, revealed that around 87 per cent of carbon emissions from UK free-range egg farms results from their use of soy-based feed brought into the UK from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and a large proportion of that can be traced back to Cargill.
“Nowhere is Cargill’s pattern of deception and destruction more apparent than in its participation in the destruction of the ‘the lungs of the planet’, the world’s forests,” said Mighty Earth in its report. “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.”
Many of Cargill’s customers, including Unilever, Tesco, McDonald’s, Carrefour, Kellogg’s, Sainsbury’s, Mars, Petcare, Ahold Delhaize, Dunkin’ Brands, and Nestle have called on Cargill to adopt a policy of expansion without deforestation, but to no avail. That catalogue of companies gives just a small glimpse into the reach of Cargill, products linked to its exports can be found across the world, and from chickens to chocolate.
Today’s news of UK poultry farming’s links to deforestation is just the tip of the iceberg, but it does give consumers a clear imperative and the means to say no to the destruction caused by Cargill. Refuse to buy dead chickens and their eggs and you cut the demand. In time, production will drop in response and less feed will be bought by UK farms. It would take a long time, but as well as the environmental benefits, the fewer chickens are raised in sheds rife with abhorrent conditions, the less pain, suffering and needless death there’ll be.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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