Cargill The Latest To Make Deforestation Pledge; Meanwhile, Half Brazil's Cerrado Already Gone
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Cargill has stated it will publish a time-bound action plan by June, in alignment with the first reporting requirement for the Soft Commodities Forum. However, a recent Oxfam report on deforestation-free commodities concluded that despite vast corporate commitments, not enough is being done to translate policies into action.
Commitments towards achieving zero-deforestation and deforestation-free supply chains have been on the rise in the last decade. A 2017 report from Forest Trends found that at least 477 companies have taken some form of voluntary zero-deforestation pledge. A lack of common definitions for everything from defining what a forest is and what deforestation is, to the difference between zero-deforestation and deforestation-free, has enabled a slew of vague commitments to be announced without common indicators for holding companies accountable.
“The result today is that firms can now choose among a range of choices, efforts, which, arguably, can allow them to find tools that fit their own bottom line interests,” said Ben Cashore, a political scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “Even if doing so isn’t best for the problem at hand.” This can be seen with soy, which has expanded by 9.5 million hectares (23.5 million acres) between 2000 and 2017 in the Cerrado region of Brazil. In 2016, over 40 percent – or 28 million tons – of all soy exports from Brazil were covered by zero-deforestation commitments. But this may not have had much – or any – impact on the ground. According to the Transparency for Sustainable Economies (Trase) platform, between 2006-2016 soy traders that had zero-deforestation commitments had similar levels of deforestation risk as non-committed companies.
A recent study co-authored by Cashore concluded that, “Companies may believe that adopting weak global commitments is a more cost effective or politically viable strategy to alleviate brand concerns and NGO pressure than replicating the strong, regional examples of the Soy Moratorium and G4 Cattle Agreement in regions with challenging regulatory, financing, and political environments.”
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https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/cargill-pledges-to-stop-forest-to-farmland-conversions-but-no-results-yet-for-the-cerrado/
