06 April 2006 - International
— It is a globally known symbol: the golden arches
can be seen in many countries around the world.
But whatever the fast food giant wants you to
believe the golden arches stand for, McDonald's
today stands for rainforest destruction. And that
is one very 'Unhappy Meal' for the planet.
The Amazon rainforest needs
no introduction; the mere mention of its name
conjures up images of a huge untouched wilderness
bursting with amazing life. But to McDonald's
and a handful of huge soya traders, the Amazon
means something completely different. It means
cheap land and cheap labour. Cheap land because
it is often stolen, cheap labour because some
of the people who work cutting down the forest
or work on the farms in the Amazon are actually
slaves. You heard it right, slaves.
'How is this possible,' you ask? Well it goes
something like this.
The soya traders encourage farmers
to cut down the rainforest and plant massive soya
monocultures. The traders take the soya and ship
it to Europe where it is fed to animals like chickens
and pigs. The animals are then turned into fast
food products like McDonald's McNuggets and many
other products found in fast food outlets and
supermarkets.
Click on the image to view animation
(Requires flash 7 - to download, click here)
The journey from rainforest
to restaurant might sound simple enough but it
has taken a year-long investigation using satellite
images, aerial surveillance, previously unreleased
government documents and on-the-ground monitoring
to expose. What we found was a global trade in
soya from rainforest destruction in the Amazon
to McDonald's fast food outlets and supermarkets
across Europe.
"This crime stretches from the heart of the
Amazon across the entire European food industry.
Supermarkets and fast food giants, like McDonald's,
must make sure their food is free from the links
to the Amazon destruction, slavery and human rights
abuses"
Greenpeace forests campaign co-ordinator, Gavin
Edwards.
Most of the global trade in soya is controlled
by a small number of massive traders: Cargill,
Bunge and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). In Brazil,
this cartel plays the role of bank to the farmers.
Instead of providing loans they give farmers seed,
fertiliser and herbicides in return for soya at
harvest: Bunge alone provided the equivalent of
nearly US$1 billion worth of seed, fertiliser
and herbicides to Brazilian farmers in 2004.
This gives the companies indirect
control over huge areas of land that used to be
rainforest. Together, these three companies are
responsible for around 60 percent of the total
financing of soya production in Brazil.
The state of Mato Grosso is
Brazil's worst in terms of deforestation and forest
fires, accounting for nearly half of all the deforestation
in the Amazon in 2003-04. In Mato Grosso, the
governor, Blairo Maggi, is known locally as the
'Soya King'. His own massive soya company Grupo
Andre Maggi controls much of the soya production
in the state and since his election in 2002, forest
destruction in Mato Grosso has increased by 30
percent.
Banks too have been caught up
in the destruction of the Amazon. The International
Finance Corporation (IFC), the private lending
arm of the World Bank, wrongly assessed a loan
to Grupo Andre Maggi as being of 'low environmental
risk,' despite evidence to the contrary. Other
banks have also lent huge sums of money to the
company without conducting their own environmental
or social impact audits.
So far, Rabobank, the Netherlands'
biggest agricultural bank has lent over US$330
million to Grupo Andre Maggi. Rabobank admitted
that it didn't do its own assessment of the risk
of the loans, simply accepting the (flawed) assessment
of the IFC.
So fast food and supermarkets,
soya traders and big banks are all trashing the
Amazon rainforest.
If we can track soya beans more
than 7,000km (4,400 miles) from farms in the Amazon
to chicken products in Europe, there is no excuse
for the food industry not to know where their
feed comes from, and to demand the exclusion of
Amazon soya from their supply chain.
