Amazon farmers grow grain and save the forest

McDonald's, Cargill, and The Nature Conservancy create a 'responsible' soy program.

By Andrew Downie | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 18, 2007 edition

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Santarem, Brazil - You might call it the greening of Chicken McNuggets.

At first glance, there seems little common ground between fast-food giant McDonald's, US commodities multinational Cargill, and The Nature Conservancy, an environmental group.

But here in the Brazilian Amazon, all three are working together to help soy farmers produce grains without cutting down the forest.

In fact, under the Responsible Soy Project, farmers in two municipalities in the northern Amazon can only sell soy to Cargill if they promise to plant trees on denuded land. McDonald's, which buys chicken fed with Brazilian soy, set that condition after pressure from environmental groups and consumers. The Nature Conservancy, with $390,000 from Cargill, assists all sides and oversees compliance.

It is, conservationists say, a potential model for sustainable development not just in the Amazon but all over Brazil, home to the world's largest rain forest.

"This is an important step in the sense that it is initiating actions to stop the deforestation of new areas," said Valmir Ortega, a senior environmental official with the Para state government. "This is being done only in a small region as of yet but it has stopped the expansion of soy [farms] in that region. We are seeing similar pressures to open other areas for other products like ethanol and palm oil and so this experience can be very illustrative."

The Responsible Soy Project is based around compliance of Brazil's Forest Code. The code dictates that Amazonian landowners must keep natural vegetation on 80 percent of their territory and farm only 20 percent.

But, like many laws in Brazil, it is largely ignored. Around 17 percent of the Amazon has disappeared, withmuch of the recent deforestation coming to make way for massive soy plantations on the southern edges of the jungle. Brazil is now the world's largest exporter of soybeans.

This project attempts to help farmers in the northern Amazon meet those legal requirements. It began three years ago after Greenpeace launched a Europe-wide campaign targeting McDonald's and Cargill as advocates of deforestation.

A two-year Greenpeace study said Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and the Bunge Corporation were actively encouraging farmers to deforest the Amazon and plant soy, which is a vital component in animal feed and one of Brazil's most lucrative exports.

"By providing everything from seeds and fertilizers to the transport and storage infrastructure needed to access global markets, these companies act as magnets drawing farmers into the Amazon," the report, "Eating Up the Amazon," stated. "They are not simply the drivers of soy agriculture, however, but key links in the chain of illegal construction, land theft, and forced labor that make Amazon soy so cheap for European consumers and so costly for everyone else."

Cargill was the worst offender of the three, the report stated, and so Greenpeace targeted them and McDonald's, who buy soy from Cargill to fatten chickens that became McNuggets.

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