Europe is internationally known for its commitment to the environment and fighting climate change. “But there is still a business that continues to embody the recklessness of a bygone era of pollution and destruction: the European meat industry,” reports Mighty Earth (March, 2018). The meat industry relies on massive quantities of soy for animal feed to raise livestock: about 3/4 of the world’s soy is used for animal feed. An area 3 times the size of Germany is dedicated to growing soy in South America, with over 30 million tons of soybeans making it to Europe annually. Deforestation is the result of a supply chain that starts on the South American frontier and ends on European plates.
Large agribusiness companies like Cargill and Bunge are bulldozing and burning thousands of hectares of an ecosystem region spanning Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay to make way for industrial soy. Waterways have become polluted, and local communities report a surge in birth defects, cancers, and respiratory illnesses in not only children, but pets and livestock as well.
The total emissions associated with the conversion of South American forest and grasslands to croplands is over 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide between 1985 and 2013, more than 4 times Germany’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion. And this trend has been accelerating. Argentina alone lost 22% of its forests between 1990 and 2015, mostly to establish soy farms.
One of the reasons why the agribusiness companies’ policies and actions are so important is that they are operating in a frequently lawless environment. In Argentina, licenses issued by the local government have illegally authorized the deforestation of 150,000 hectares of protected forest, leaving soy businesses to clear land with impunity. But they would not have an incentive to do so if European companies were unwilling to buy deforestation-based soy in the first place. Despite Cargill and Bunge publicly declaring their commitment to eliminating deforestation from their operations, it has continued to occur in their supply chains.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Should soy-farming sustainability be an OM concern?
- What can be done to minimize the impact on South American ecology?