Soy giant Cargill exposes UK chicken sector to illegal deforestation as Brazil’s forests burn
Link to Report Link to Press Release
For the first time Mighty Earth’s investigation, in collaboration with AGtivist, has established commercial ties between US commodities giant Cargill and Moy Park, one of the largest poultry producers in the UK, and owned by JBS USA subsidiary Pilgrim’s Pride. Moy Park supplies chicken products to UK businesses, Aldi, Asda, Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose, KFC and McDonald’s.
Our report, Foul Play, reveals how the UK chicken sector, including leading supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, risk exposure to illegal deforestation-linked soy via Cargill. The findings come as Brazil experiences the worst forest fires in decades, driven largely by factory farming. In the Cerrado, where Cargill has extensive soy operations, 2.4 million hectares were burned in August 2024, representing nearly half (43%) of Brazil’s total burned area. Across the country, Brazil recorded a 149% increase of burned area in August 2023 compared to August last year.
In April 2024, investigators tracked trucks from Cargill’s soy crusher terminal in Liverpool docks to Moy Park feed mills in Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, which supply feed to Moy Park’s extensive network of over 800 intensive poultry farms in the UK, confirming for the first time the link between Cargill and Moy Park.
Our report shows:
- We identified seven cases of deforestation tied to Cargill in four municipalities linked to the UK soy supply. These cases represent 11,827 hectares of deforestation between April 2022 and September 2023, with more than half (6,441 hectares) occurring within in the farms’ Areas of Permanent Protection (APP) or legal reserve – i.e. illegal deforestation.
- From January 2022 to October 2023, Cargill imported 777,534 tonnes of soy from Brazil to Liverpool docks, with a further 198,114 tonnes of Cargill soy shipped to other UK ports.
- Moy Park’s soy footprint for 2023 was 217,392 tons, representing over 14% of the entire UK’s total poultry soybean meal usage.
- 87.5% of Moy Park’s soy came from ‘High-Risk’ deforestation countries including Brazil (40.4%), Paraguay (44.8%) and Argentina (2/3%).
- British supermarkets and fast-food chains linked to two of the world’s most controversial companies, Cargill and JBS, risk breaching upcoming UK laws
- Without robust UK legislation to clean up commodity supply chains, which mandates farm level traceability and further aligns with EU law, the global meat industry will continue to wage a war on nature and UK businesses will be exposed to legal risk.
What Mighty Earth is calling for:
The new UK Government must urgently focus efforts on implementing Schedule 17 of the Environment Act (2021) and to prioritise strengthening the secondary legislation to:
- Ensure guidance obliges businesses to verify that relevant land use and ownership, environmental and human rights in producer countries have not been violated.
- Require businesses using forest risk commodities in the UK to collect farm-unit level information about the origin of their product as a mandatary part of their due diligence reporting.
- Remove any reference to the suggested ‘ALARP’ (as low as reasonably practicable) model, identified in our report as unsuitable for this legislation’s purposes.
- Work closely with the EU to ensure synergy across reporting, easing the burden of a two-system approach for UK businesses and suppliers.
- Establish and adequately resource the enforcement and monitoring body responsible for assessing compliance and urgently confirm commencement dates.
