Cargill and ADM, two of the world’s leading livestock feed companies, helped to scupper an attempt to end the trade in soya beans grown on deforested and threatened ecosystem lands in South America, a new report alleges.
Soya is one of the cheapest available types of edible protein, and is in huge demand for feed for animals around the world; as our consumption of meat and dairy has risen globally, the need for soya has soared too.
But its production has been directly associated with deforestation in some of the most threatened landscapes around the world. Last year, in response to internal concerns and growing public awareness of the issue, 14 leading grain traders worked intensively to agree a ban on buying soya beans grown on some of those landscapes, including Brazil’s Amazon forest, the Pantanal wetlands and the Cerrado savanna, according to the report.
The ban would have imposed a backdated deadline of 2020 on soya buyers, and was expected to be announced at last year’s UN Cop27 climate conference in Egypt, the report said. The backdated deadline was aimed at preventing harvested soya already grown on threatened land areas from entering global markets, and avoiding the deforesting scramble a future deadline might have provoked.
But instead of agreeing the ban, Cargill and ADM “led the push” for weaker language in the final statement, according to one person involved in the discussions between the 14 grain traders before Cop27. “If Cargill – or ADM – had not taken those positions, the outcome would have been different,” the source said.
The Guardian spoke to several of the report’s sources who confirmed their quotes but did not wish to be named.
The soya agreement that was signed by the companies, included in the November 2022 agriculture sector roadmap to 1.5C, was seen as a failure by many NGOs. A group representing retailers including Asda, Aldi, Lidl, M&S and Tesco told Cargill and ADM the agreement was inadequate, inconsistent and insufficient.
The new report by Mighty Earth, an NGO which has previously called Cargill “the worst company in the world”, follows news that soya land conversion has surged in Brazil’s Cerrado. That rise is largely driven by the expansion of soya grown for animal feed, according to Mighty Earth’s CEO, Glenn Hurowitz. “If Cargill had signed up to the ban … the other companies would have followed the leader.” As a result we would not be seeing “the forests and biomes of South America bulldozed at such an alarming scale and pace”, he said.
Two other leading commodity companies, Amaggi and Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), were committed to the soya ban initiative, Mighty Earth’s report said. Both have “stronger commitments [than Cargill and ADM] to end all soya linked to deforestation and conversion”, said David Cleary, director of global agriculture at The Nature Conservancy, an NGO. The term conversion is used to describe threatened ecosystem lands that are converted to soya plantations, whether forested or not.
Apparent inconsistencies between Cargill’s public and private stances on traceability were uncovered by the Mighty Earth investigation. On its website, Cargill rates its Brazilian soya supply chain as 100% traceable. But a February 2022 email quoted Cargill saying it was “basically impossible to ensure traceability” in its Brazilian soya supplies because beans from different sources are mixed at port silos.
The email, seen by the Guardian, was from a European Commission official and described a meeting with Cargill. It was released to Mighty Earth under freedom of information laws.
Asked about the claim, Cleary said Cargill was most likely referring to a lack of traceability in their indirect soya supply. This represents about a third of total supplies, he said, and is often used as an excuse for delaying traceability improvements. “Traceability [of indirect soya supplies] is harder but not impossible, hence often used as an excuse by laggards,” Cleary said.
Speaking from Brazil, Cleary added that although “all the companies are moaning” about the EU’s new deforestation regulations, introduced in June this year with an 18-month compliance window, they were all, including Cargill, preparing to meet requirements.
In an email received by the Guardian after publication, Cargill said the accusations in the Mighty Earth report were inaccurate and that it had “traced 100% of our directly sourced volumes in Brazil back to the farm polygon map – the most sophisticated and complete method available for tracing the source locations of the commodities we trade.” The email also said Cargill was “one of the original signatories of the Corporate Statement of Purpose that launched at COP26 and actively worked with the industry to develop the Agriculture Sector Roadmap introduced at COP27.”
The report adds that Cargill has said it was “proud to be one of the 14 companies that came together to address deforestation in key biomes and supply chains” as part of the November 2022 Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5C. “As an industry, we collectively aligned on all aspects of the roadmap as the best path forward for protecting these critical South American forest ecosystems,” it said.
ADM did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment, but a comment in the report states that the participants in the roadmap “worked together collegially and continue to do so. ADM believes that action must be taken to prevent both deforestation and conversion, and we have a strong record of responsible sourcing and monitoring our supply chains. We have achieved 100% traceability and 99% deforestation and conversion-free supply chains in Brazil, which includes the Cerrado”.
A person involved in the Cop27 soya ban discussions said, on condition of anonymity, that the Mighty Earth report was “somewhat misleading” because it implies “there was an agreed goal and the traders didn’t deliver on it”. Rather, the source said, there were “expectations” a ban would be announced at Cop27, but they were “unrealistic given the practices of the companies involved”.
