UK company heavily linked to Amazon deforestation

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Multinational companies are largely responsible for the deforestation and demise of the Amazon rainforest. 

Read more: The Amazon's ongoing colonization is still relevant

One of the most known companies that have been actively destroying the forest - other than American Airlines, Starbucks, JBS and beyond - is Cargill.

Cargill is a main supplier for animal feed, and it continues to purchase soya and corn from a farm which is responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon. 

Cargill sells feed to chicken farms in the United Kingdom, and it buys crops from a soybean farm on deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon; the supplier farm goes by the name Fazenda Conquista, as revealed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Greenpeace Unearthed, Reporter Brasil and Ecostorm. 

Since 2013, the farm has deforested around 8 square-kilometers of land, including several forest fires that were recorded in 2020. 

The farm will be supplying 5,700 tonnes of corn to Cargill this year.

Cargill, after 2008, has promised not to buy soya beans from deforested land in the Amazon. Last year, the same company also pledged to accelerate the abolishment of "commodity-driven deforestation."

However, such promises were unmet: In 2020, 800 square kilometers of deforestation were reported, in addition to 12,000 fires since 2015, as discovered by Bureau and Unearthed. The aforementioned lands were used by Cargill. 

Cargill exports thousands of tonnes of Brazilian soya to the UK every year.

“Meat chickens are the most intensively farmed animals in the UK with over a billion slaughtered each year,” Lindsay Duncan, the campaigns manager at World Animal Protection UK, said.

“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.”

Around 25% of all soya imported to the UK are from Brazil, and most of that percentage is supplied by Cargill. 

Fazenda Conquista addressed the forest fires, saying that the farm obtained permission from the local environmental agency, Sema, to go on with a "controlled burn" on the lands, due to the reasoning that they had been deforested in the 80s. 

Sema weighed in on the topic, saying that yes, there has been an authorization to burn the farm in 2012 with some limits and exceptions, but no licenses were given for full deforestation, making the action unauthorized. 

Nevertheless and sadly, deforestation of Amazonia has increased 22% from Junly 2020 to July 2021.