Prince Charles: Companies chased away from Amazonian rainforests now destroying plains

[Judi Lynn]

The Prince of Wales is encouraging companies to sign up to the Cerrado manifesto, which aims to protect globally important natural landscapes

Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent
Wednesday 25 October 2017 09.46 EDT

The loss of rainforest in the Amazon has been a familiar cause for activism for more than 30 years, but the partial success of efforts to protect it is moving the spotlight to a new landscape: Brazil’s cerrado.

Environmentalists fear that measures to reduce the exploitation of the Amazon rainforest for commodities such as soy and beef have pushed some of those activities into formerly less exploited regions such as the cerrado, a vast tropical savannah covering more than 2m sq km.

The Prince of Wales highlighted the issue on Wednesday morning when he called for Brazil’s cerrado, and other areas at risk around the world, to receive greater protection. “An increasing concern is the extent to which success in reducing agricultural expansion into forests comes at the expense of the destruction of other wonderful ecosystems such as the cerrado, the chaco and the world’s remaining savannahs,” he told an international audience of government officials and business people. “All of [these landscapes] are also vital for the services they provide and the biodiversity that they sustain.”

At the conference hosted by the Prince at Lancaster House in London, attended by forested countries including Brazil, Gabon, Ghana and Indonesia, a group of 23 companies signed up to a new resolution to halt the destruction of the cerrado and ensure that any future commercial exploitation of the area is sustainable and well-managed. The companies included major retailers and food groups, such as Walmart, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Carrefour, McDonald’s, Nando’s, Nestle and L’Oreal.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/25/amazon-rainforests-prince-charles-cerrado-manifesto