19 May 2021
•
6 min read
Soy, livestock, timber, cocoa and palm oil are among the commodities most responsible for driving deforestation worldwide
Two new reports today warn urgent is needed to eliminate deforestation arising from surging demand for soy
Green groups have today sought to raise the alarm over how soaring global demand for soy is fuelling deforestation and rising greenhouse gas emissions, with leading companies accused of failing to adequately deliver on sustainable supply chain pledges and crackdown on suppliers linked to forest clearances.
Two separate reports from WWF and Greenpeace have similarly highlighted how soy remains a major driver of deforestation, especially in South America, despite the growing number of pledges from retailers and agri-businesses to develop sustainable soy supply chains.
WWF, along with Global Canopy, a non-profit working to create a deforestation-free economy, has today launched a scorecard to measure the commitments and actions taken by some of the biggest soy companies to address the impact of soy production on forests and human rights abuses in their supply chains. It assessed 22 of the world's soy trading giants, together responsible for more than two-thirds of global soy exports, and concluded that across much of the industry insufficient action is being taken to limit environmental damage or uphold climate commitments.
Millions of hectares of "critical habitat" in the Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, the Gran Chaco, and Chiquitania in South America and North America's Great Plains have been razed for soy fields, the conservation organisation said, describing soy farming as "one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss and climate change." Soy expansion is increasingly encroaching on African savannahs and native grasslands in Central Asia, as well, the report warned
Collectively, the 22 traders wield enough power to trigger large-scale, transformative change across the soy industry, WWF said, yet too little is being done to curtail soy-linked deforestation.
Of the nine traders who responded to WWF's scorecard survey, representing over half of soy exports worldwide, the highest total score obtained by a company was 52.5 per cent. Where companies had climate strategies in place, the scorecards underlined an absence of clear cut-off dates for emissions commitments and highighted how targets are not applied equally across full supply chains or to all ecosystems threatened by production. None of the traders had pledged to stop sourcing soy produced on Amazon land converted after 2020, the report stated.
Agricultural expansion is also causing mounting pressure on indigenous peoples and local communities, which are often evicted from their land and lose their livelihoods as a result, the report added.
"Nature is in freefall and our global food and farming system is driving this collapse," said Mike Barrett, WWF's executive director of science and conservation. "Most soy is grown in South America, where too often it comes at the expense of natural ecosystems that are home to both spectacular wildlife and indigenous peoples and communities who rely on the land for their livelihoods."
He called on soy traders to "urgently raise their ambitions to stop the destruction of nature". But he also stressed that until the products and food consumed in the UK are deforestation-free, we all "remain part of the problem".
Soy is a significant contributor to agriculture's carbon footprint: 75 per cent of the world's soybean crop is used as animal feed for poultry, pigs, livestock, and farmed fish. Much of it is shipped around the world to livestock farms, with only five per cent of the global soy harvest used for direct human consumption in products such as tofu or soy milk.
WWF is now calling on the UK government to use its planned Environment Bill to strengthen proposed rules governing the import of "forest risk" products to the UK and establish a stronger mandatory 'due diligence obligation' on those businesses importing and using soy products.
"With the Environment Bill due to return to parliament, the UK Government must use this opportunity to set ambitious new laws to end deforestation, reduce our global footprint and set nature on the path to recovery," Barrett said.
The WWF report comes on the same day as Greenpeace's Unearthed website published a major new investigation in conjunction with Repórter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which accuses three of the world's largest agricultural commodity businesses of purchasing soya from companies that have been linked to deforestation and fires in the Brazilian Amazon. The report claims Bunge, Cofco, and Cargill have bought soya from Fiagril Ltda, a Chinese-owned company, and from multinational firm Aliança Agrícola do Cerrado, both of which have sourced soya from a farmer sanctioned and fined for large swathes of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
Unearthed said the findings "raise concerns that major traders are able to effectively circumvent a moratorium on purchases of soya linked to deforestation in the Amazon, potentially allowing 'dirty' soya linked to destruction of the vital habitat to enter the global supply chain".
In 2006 international soy traders and environmental groups agreed to an Amazon Soy Moratorium, which has been credited with helping to significantly curtail soy-linked deforestation in the region. But Unearthed said its investigation had highlighted a loophole in the moratorium, which allows soya traders to continue buying from farmers who are known to engage in deforestation, as long as they are not buying soya grown on the specific plots of land that have been cleared. Experts fear this approach increases the risk of deforestation-linked soya being laundered from deforesting farms to nearby "clean" ones.
The investigation centres on Brazilian soya, corn and cattle farmer Alexandra Aparecida Perinoto who is understood to have at least one property on the Soy Moratorium "blacklist" that is circulated annually to traders. Both Fiagril and Aliança Agrícola insisted they had complied with the moratorium, but they did not specify which of Perinoto's properties they purchased soya from. When asked by Unearthed how it could be certain that soya grown on Perinoto's nearby, deforested land had not contaminated its purchases, Fiagril said it monitored "the production of all customers through technical reports in the various stages of production and harvest". Both Fiagril and Aliança said an independent audit had found their purchases to be in compliance with the rules of the moratorium.
But Greenpeace Brazil, a member of the Soy Moratorium Working Group, said: "The 2019/20 audit process evaluation is still ongoing … Some reports are incomplete and inconclusive, so further clarifications were required from the companies. The findings of this investigation linking Fiagril to potentially illegal soy are extremely concerning and we will make sure they are fully investigated and appropriate action taken."
The multinational commodity giants accused of purchasing soya from Fiagril and Aliança all stressed that they remained fully committed to complying with the soya moratorium and had stringent auditing policies and processes in place for blocking supplies from farms linked to deforestation.
However, today's two separate reports will spark fresh questions about the wider impact of soaring global demand for soy, the ability of companies to accurately track where their commodities have been sourced from, and the inability of regulators to bring illegal deforestation to an end. The global soy industry is now firmly in the sights of campaigners and without urgent action risks becoming as synonymous with forest destruction as a palm oil industry that has found itself under intense pressure from consumers, investors, and regulators to clean up its act.
