80% of soybeans go to feeding livestock...

The Independent (London) July 17, 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1181617.ece

Eating the Amazon: The Fight to Curb Corporate Destruction

Huge soya farms financed by Cargill, the largest privately owned company in

the world, are the rainforest's new worst enemy

by Daniel Howden

The scars are unmistakably man made. Hard-edged squares and

rectangles,hundreds of acres across, hacked and burned out of the Amazon

rainforest. The dark green of the canopy is lacerated with thin red lines -

the illegal dirt roads that stitch together these giant clearings.

Seen from the air, this fearful symmetry marks out the battle lines of an

invasion that has seen the humble soya bean emerge as the greatest threat

to the world's most important rainforest.

On the ground, what was once a thriving ecosystem supporting at least 300

tree species for every hectare, is now a wasteland. Dead roots and dry

grass crunch underfoot and the breeze throws up dust from eroded soil.

Three hours' drive outside the city of Santarem in Para state, along dirt

trails struck by illegal loggers, you arrive in a vast monoculture inside

the Tapajos National Park. Soya fields laden with the dry brown seed pods

stretch in every direction.

This is Father Edilberto Sena's parish. The fiery local priest has emerged

as a fierce critic of the land-grabbers, loggers, ranchers and agrobusiness

multinationals pushing further and further into the rainforest.

The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world's mammals and 15 per

cent of the world's land-based plant species. It holds more than half of

the world's fresh water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink

on the planet, providing a vital check on the greenhouse effect.

Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world's leading exporter of

soya. The protein-rich bean has become a profitable link in the processed

food chain and 80 per cent of world production is fed to livestock.

Brazilian soya beans are feeding Europe's growing hunger for cheap meat

substitutes, and have overtaken logging and cattle ranching as the main

engine of deforestation.

Three years ago, the agrobusiness giant Cargill, the largest privately

owned company in the world, opened a soya port in Santarem. And Father

Edilberto has set himself on a collision course with the Minnesota

multinational that he says represents the worst of rapacious capitalism.

Father Edilberto has used the church-funded Radio Rurale de Santarem as a

means of fighting back against the incursions of the illegal loggers,

ranchers and soya farmers, who in turn supply the grain giants.

"We are small and we are fighting multinationals like Cargill - people who

are using soya as a commodity. I'm sure there are at least 200,000

listening. Our objective is to educate the people, provide critical and

objective news."

It is less than 18 months since another rainforest campaigner and champion

of Brazil's rural poor, Sister Dorothy Stang, was murdered in broad

daylight further east in Para state, in the city of Anapu. After death

threats, the US-born, naturalised Brazilian nun was assassinated by gunmen

allied to illegal ranchers.

"I don't need a uniform," says the outspoken priest, who eschews the

Catholic garb for a green polo shirt and an indigenous necklace. "My

uniform is my face and my mouth. People know I'm a priest."

Lately he has started to receive the same kind of threats that preceded the

murder of Sister Dorothy. "Two months ago, some crazy, nuts guy posted on

the internet that the best thing they could do with Father Edilberto Sena

was to kill me.

"When I heard about this, the first moment I had a coldness in my spine."

The priest's frequent broadsides against the vested interests eating into

the Amazon have made him powerful enemies, and the diocese has come under

heavy pressure, he claims, to muzzle him. "The elite, they got mad at us

and told the bishop to close us down."

For now, it seems the Bishop's support is holding and Radio Rurale is still

on air, but Father Edilberto launched an impassioned appeal for help to

international church leaders visiting the area as part of a major

environmental conference organised by the Greek-based NGO, Religion,

Science and the Environment. The symposium is the latest initiative by

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Eastern Orthodox pope who has been

preaching against the sin of environmental destruction for more than a

decade.

"The Church needs to take sides," says Father Edilberto. "With what we are

facing we need all the allies we can find."

Santarem, a riverside city hundreds of miles upstream into the Amazon, has

found itself at the centre of the soya boom. Last year, Brazil produced

more than 50 million tons of soya across nearly 23 million hectares, an

area about the size of the United Kingdom. Soya production remains

relatively contained within the Amazon biome, but the decision to locate a

major soya port this deep into the basin is inviting a catastrophe,

according to conservation groups.

In the past three years, nearly 70,000 square kilometres of the Amazon

rainforest have been destroyed. The smoke from burning trees pushed Brazil

into the top four of global greenhouse gas producers in 2004. Despite

commitments from the government of President Lula da Silva, the destruction

of the Amazon rainforest continues.

Almost three-quarters of it occurs illegally. Brazil's award-winning

Environment Minister, Marina da Silva, speaking at the RSE symposium, was

keen to point to progress being made in slowing the rate of deforestation.

According to government figures based on a satellite survey, there was a 32

per cent decrease in the rate of deforestation last year.

With satellite monitoring stations now in place and providing an annual

overview of the Amazon basin to the general public, the deforestation is no

longer taking place unknown to the authorities. But that may not be enough,

she admitted.

"We need to create the feeling that we are being watched all the time and

that those who are doing something wrong will be caught and punished. In

some countries it is already too late. It's not too late here. We can still

save it," Ms da Silva said.

But the cycle of deforestation where state-owned reserves are infiltrated

by loggers and ranchers looking for "free land" now has a third and more

lethal phase, where the cleared land is sold to soya producers who

intensively farm the soil until it can no longer bring a harvest. The

cutters then move to new areas and the process is repeated. Within as

little as three years, rich and fertile rainforest supporting incredible

biodiversity can be reduced to a desert.

Cargill's giant silos now dominate the shore in Santarem, on a site which

used to be a beach used by local fishermen. The food multinational has been

accused by Greenpeace of illegally setting up this conveyor belt facility

which delivers exclusively to the European market, and caters for more than

one-third of the UK's imports of soya.

The family-owned behemoth, with a turnover of more than $7bn (£3.8bn) and

offices in a replica French chateau in Minnesota, is the undisputed ruler

of the global grain trade. As the company website says: "We buy, trade,

transport, blend, mill, crush, process, refine, season, distribute and

deliver around the clock and around the globe."

It also owns British-based Sun Valley foods, which processes a million

chickens a week into fresh and frozen, supermarket wrapped products. Its

major clients are McDonald's and the Morrisons chain.

Later this summer the Brazilian high court is due to rule on whether

Cargill's facility should be shut down. Already, two lower courts have

ruled against Cargill on the grounds that the company did not complete the

necessary environmental impact study before opening the facility. But

orders to temporarily suspend operations have been overturned by a barrage

of appeals to higher courts.

Cargill, in an official statement, has rebutted these claims, saying that

the court battle is all over a technicality. "Cargill followed all the

permitting requirements of the applicable government agencies for the

construction and operation of the Santarem facility," the company said in a

statement. Cargill continues to insist that the legal action relates only

to the specific kind of impact study it should have conducted. Cargill also

maintains that its practices are transparent and that it is "committed to

sustainable development which creates income to support thriving

communities and enables environmental management over time".

Meanwhile, the conveyor belt keeps moving, the tankers keep coming, and the

grain keeps making its way to the fast-food counters and supermarket

shelves of Europe.

Cargill has not limited itself to sourcing, processing and shipping. It

also provides the financing needed to keep the expansion of soya going.

Brazilian banks will not lend to farmers with no title to their lands, so

Cargill steps into the breach, providing loans for everything from

bulldozers and chainsaws to seeds and harvesters.

Cayetano Scannavino Filao has been working with indigenous people inside

the Tapajos for nearly two decades. "When I came here from Sao Paolo 20

years ago, all of this was forest. It is enough to make you cry," he said.

He helps to run a local NGO, Health and Happiness, which works with the

remote and impoverished communities that have found themselves in the way

of big agrobusiness. The region is home to 220,000 people from 180

different indigenous groups, many of whom live deep in the forest and are

dependent on the rainforest and the river for everything from food and

tools to medicines and shelter.

"Today we have a conflict situation," he laments. "Since the opening of the

port, deforestation in this area has increased by 511 per cent. I'm not

against soya, I'm against soya in the Amazon biome. We used to fight the

loggers, but the loggers, they eat the Amazon in small bites; the soya is

eating the Amazon in big bites."

Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, who works for an environment agency in the

remote Acre region of the Amazon, has seen with his own eyes how big those

bites can be. In many cases, the illegal invaders don't even bother with

logging. In the worst cases, earth-movers are sent in to bulldoze priceless

primary forest into giant pits where the logs are then burnt.

"They bulldoze the trees into big holes in the ground and they burn what's

left," Mr da Silva said. The great trunks, he says, can take more than a

fortnight to burn, and keep smouldering for months after. It was in the

context of this kind of assault that the federal government acted to stop

the extinction of the Brazil nut tree, a national icon and a profitable and

sustainable source of revenue for the people of the Amazon.

The result of the consequent ban on cutting the tree is testament to the

irrational and violent threat facing a rainforest vital to the survival of

the planet. The Brazil nut trees now stand like sentinels towering over the

sea of soya. Preserved while all around them their ecology is destroyed,

they are destined to die of loneliness.

Stripped of supporting vegetation their fate is to perish from exposure to

a tropical sun that only their highest branches were ever meant to see.

Those that endure will be charred black in August, when the farmers torch

the crops ready to plant next season's crop of soya.

From Corporate Watch:

http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=2628

Cargill's involvement at every link in the food supply chain [159]

*created a joint venture with

Monsanto-Renessen to develop genetically

engineered soya for animal feed [160]

*supplies seed and fertiliser to farmers

*gives loans to farmers through Cargill-owned Bank of Ellsworth

*makes production contracts with farmers to grow grain

*collects, transports, processes and exports grain

*manufactures animal feed

*makes production contracts with farmers to rear cattle and pigs

*processes and packages beef and pork products

*supplies beef, under a long-term

agreement, to Kroger Supermarkets (one of the

biggest US supermarket chains)