Agribusiness plan to end deforestation: no targets, no accountability, more destruction

The meat industry lost a golden opportunity to end deforestation today and seems hell-bent on making sure they keep missing. The roadmap’s insistence that individual companies undertake best efforts to establish individual cut-off dates for deforestation no later than 2025 means the bulldozers will keep running and the destruction will continue.

Cargill, Bunge, and the other companies are trying to defy that we’re in a climate and nature crisis, as well undermining President Lula’s agenda that puts forests at the center of Brazil’s economic and political development.

“They’re also defying the calls of their own customers, the supermarkets who called on them to end deforestation effective from 2020. They seem to expect that they can continue to get away with deforestation with impunity. It’s up to supermarkets like Carrefour and Tesco to make sure there are consequences for their continued role in burning the Amazon and other ecosystems.”

“The Amazon has lost more than 2 billon trees in the last four years and every day that passes takes it closer to a tipping point, where it is no longer able to function and play its part in cooling a warming world. It’s up to private sector and government to make the vision of Nature, as an essential part of the climate solution, a reality.