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palm oil
Oreo’s Sweet Image Hides a Bitter Truth About Forests and Human Rights
Oreo may seem harmless. But when palm oil is sourced from destroyed rainforest or land taken without consent, the cost is not just environmental—it is human.
Feb 19, 2026
Oreo is marketed as “milk’s favorite cookie.” But behind that familiar blue package is a supply chain tied to rainforest destruction and violence against the people who defend their land.
Mondelēz International, the corporate giant that makes Oreo, has built a global snack empire worth nearly $40 billion a year. Its products line grocery shelves across the country. What most consumers never see is the palm oil that goes into those products—or the damage connected to its production.
Palm oil expansion remains one of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation. It is also linked to land grabs, intimidation, and violence against Indigenous and local communities who resist losing their forests.
According to Rainforest Action Network’s 2025 Keep Forests Standing Scorecard, Mondelēz ranked last among major consumer goods companies on deforestation and human rights safeguards. The company scored just 4 out of 24 possible points. Most alarming, it received zero points for having a public policy protecting Human Rights Defenders—people who face threats, criminalization, and violence for standing up to destructive development.
Communities should not be displaced for cookies.
Between 2015 and 2024, more than 6,400 attacks and over 1,000 killings of land and environmental defenders were documented worldwide. Industrial agriculture is a major driver of this violence.
These defenders are farmers, Indigenous leaders, journalists, teachers, and community members. They are protecting forests that stabilize the climate, regulate rainfall, and support biodiversity found nowhere else on Earth. They are also protecting their homes.
Mondelēz has been exposed more than once for sourcing palm oil linked to illegal deforestation in Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem—often called the “Orangutan Capital of the World.” The Leuser region is one of the last places on Earth where critically endangered species including rhinos, elephants, tigers, and orangutans still coexist in the wild. It is also home to Indigenous communities who depend on intact forests for survival.
Satellite monitoring continues to show forest loss in protected areas within this ecosystem. That means safeguards are failing.
Mondelēz promotes its “Snacking Made Right” campaign as proof of sustainability leadership. But marketing language does not stop chainsaws. Without enforceable policies and independent monitoring, companies continue to profit while forests fall.
The absence of a Human Rights Defender policy is not a minor oversight. It sends a message through the supply chain that violence and intimidation are not red lines. When corporations fail to adopt zero-tolerance policies against threats and criminalization, suppliers operate with fewer consequences.
This is not just about environmental damage. It is about whether communities have the right to say no when their land is targeted for development. It is about Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. It is about whether corporate profit outweighs human safety.
Deforestation is accelerating the climate crisis. Tropical rainforests absorb carbon and cool the planet. When they are cleared, that stored carbon is released, intensifying global warming. From stronger hurricanes to prolonged droughts and wildfires, the effects are already visible.
Corporations that rely on forest-risk commodities have the power to change this trajectory. Mondelēz could require full traceability for its palm oil supply. It could suspend suppliers linked to deforestation or violence. It could adopt a clear, public Human Rights Defender policy with zero tolerance for intimidation and criminalization. It could require proof that communities have granted Free, Prior, and Informed Consent before land is developed.
Instead, it continues business as usual.
Oreo may seem harmless. But when palm oil is sourced from destroyed rainforest or land taken without consent, the cost is not just environmental—it is human.
Communities should not be displaced for cookies. Forest defenders should not risk their lives so multinational corporations can maintain margins.
Mondelēz has the size and influence to shift industry standards. What it lacks is the political will.
Protecting forests starts with protecting the people who defend them. Until companies like Mondelēz adopt enforceable policies that prioritize human rights and end deforestation in their supply chains, their sustainability claims will ring hollow.
Consumers deserve snacks that do not come at the expense of forests and communities. And the people risking their lives to protect the planet deserve more than silence from the corporations profiting from their land.
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Financial Titans, Top Brands Implicated in Probe of 'Devastating' Palm Oil Industry Abuses
"Papua New Guinean communities… are being sold out by their own government and global financial institutions in favor of a small number of highly destructive companies."
Oct 08, 2021
From the use of child labor and beatings of locals to the destruction of "climate-critical rainforest," an investigative report published Thursday exposes how the abuse of people and the planet by Papua New Guinea's palm oil sector has direct ties to global financiers and major household brands.
"It is increasingly urgent that governments legislate to prevent supply chains and global financiers bankrolling deforestation and human rights abuses."
For its news report--entitled The True Price of Palm Oil: How global finance funds deforestation, violence, and human rights abuses in Papua New Guinea--the international NGO Global Witness conducted a two-year investigation into Bewani Oil Palm Plantations Ltd., East New Britain Resources Group (ENB), and the Rimbunan Hijau Group. What it found implicates some of the world's most profitable corporations.
Global Witness examined cargo shipments, company records, and satellite imagery, and interviewed people in the rural communities directly affected by plantations in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Undercover investigators also secretly recorded conversations in which ENB executives and a business partner bragged about using "schoolchildren" to pick the oil palm fruits, bribing local ministers, and paying off police to "brutalize villagers."
The United Kingdom's Channel 4 News, which exclusively reported on some of Global Witness' findings, noted that ENB denied the bribery and using child labor, and both ENB and its business partner Tobar Investment denied any involvement in police brutality. All the companies contacted by news outlet said they have severed ties with ENB.
According to Global Witness, "Tainted palm oil and its derivatives from Papua New Guinea plantations were sold on to well-known big brands including Kellogg's, Nestle, Colgate, Danone, Hershey, and PZ Cussons and Reckitt Benckiser, the parent companies of Imperial Leather and Strepsils."
The report also points out that PNG palm oil operations have received direct and indirect financing from international institutions including BlackRock, California Public Employees' Retirement System, Maybank, and Norges Bank Investment Management--which manages Norway's sovereign wealth fund--OCBC Bank, and Robeco Institutional Asset Management B.V.
"Papua New Guinean communities have managed and protected their forests sustainably for countless generations," Global Witness senior investigator Lela Stanley said in a statement. "This investigation shows they are being sold out by their own government and global financial institutions in favor of a small number of highly destructive companies, with devastating human rights and environmental consequences."
"This investigation is yet further confirmation that the global financial system is broken--the business-as-usual, voluntary approach of past years has led us into climate crisis," she continued. "Firms like BlackRock talk a big game on their commitment tackling climate change and protecting human rights, yet our revelations show its money is ultimately financing the destruction of climate-critical forests, the use of child labor, and other human rights abuses."
Stanley added that "it is increasingly urgent that governments legislate to prevent supply chains and global financiers bankrolling deforestation and human rights abuses."
Palm oil, which comes from the fruit of the oil palm tree, is used in various food products, detergents, and cosmetics. While the new report focuses on operations in PNG--an island nation north of Australia home to the world's third-largest remaining rainforest--the industry has long faced criticism for driving deforestation and endangering workers and wildlife.
The report includes recommendations for the PNG government as well as those of the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, and other nations with involved financial institutions and businesses importing palm oil. There are also recommendations for the palm oil companies named in the report, global buyers, and banks as well as their shareholders and investors.
"PNG stands on a precipice," the report warns. "Rural communities and the forests and biodiversity they depend on are in the path of a massive expansion of the palm oil industry. This would be catastrophic if allowed to proceed in the same reckless, irresponsible, and unethical way as exposed in this report."
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Agro-Imperialism in the Time of Covid-19
All this greed at the top leaves devastation and little to trickle down to the bottom, where its consequences are deadly.
Jul 14, 2020
Nestle, the world's largest food company, is known for scandal. It earned the nickname "babykiller" in the 1970s for causing infant illness and death in low-income communities by promoting bottle feeding of its infant formula and discouraging breastfeeding. In recent years, similar charges have been made against the company for contributing to soaring rates of obesity and diabetes in poor communities by targeting them for sales of ultra-processed junk foods. But there's another scandal of equally grim proportions that is contained within the company's accounting sheets.
On April 23, 2020, with the world in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic and the FAO warning of a looming global food crisis, Nestle's shareholders and executives awarded themselves a record dividend payout of US$8 billion. In a time of a global health and food crisis, this handout is worth more than the entire annual budget for the UN's World Food Programme and would be enough to cover the average annual expenditures on health care for more than 100 million people in Africa.
Nestle's massive 2020 dividend payment was, in fact, just a fraction higher than the previous year's. Such large payouts for shareholders and executives is standard practice for the company-- as it is for all the big transnational food and agribusiness companies, even at times of global health catastrophes. Other notable shareholder dividends, announced in April this year, include a US$2.8 billion payout by the world's largest seed and agrochemical company Bayer AG, a US$600 million payout by the world's largest poultry producer Tyson and a US$500 million payout by the world's largest pork company, the WH Group. Cargill, the word's largest agribusiness company, is on track to top last year's record payout of US$640 million, which it makes to just a small number of Cargill family members. Increased e-commerce, particularly of food items, during the Covid-19 crisis increased the net worth of Jeff Bezos, the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, by a shocking US$24 billion. It is even a rich time for the shareholders of smaller players in the industry, like the oil palm and rubber plantation company SOCFIN. The two French and Belgian families that essentially own the company, received EUR20 million (around US$22.5 million) in dividends and remunerations from SOCFIN's group operations while communities where it operates in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon cannot access clean or safe water.
All this greed at the top leaves devastation and little to trickle down to the bottom, where its consequences are deadly.
A powerful industry in the midst of a "perfect storm"
The labourers in the corporate food system, those who are quite literally dying on the frontlines to sustain the lifestyles of shareholders and executives, are not faring well. The supply chains of the big food companies, which have always been dangerous places for workers, have now become hotspots for Covid-19 infections and transmission. Across the world, there have been deadly outbreaks in meat plants, port facilities, warehouses, fish canneries, oil palm plantations, fruit farms, supermarkets and all other points along the chains that these companies command-- with the exception of their office towers, of course.
The big meat companies have perhaps been the worst offenders. With the Covid-19 pandemic in full bloom, they aggressively sped up their assembly lines to ramp up exports to China, where meat prices are unusually high. This decision was taken in full knowledge that these increases in processing made social distancing impossible and put their workers and the surrounding communities at risk of mass virus outbreaks. By the end of May, the results in the biggest meat exporting nations were horrific: hundreds of migrant meat plant workers sick with Covid-19 in Germany and Spain, thousands of cases of workers ill with Covid-19 in Brazil's meat packing industry, and over 20,000 workers infected with Covid-19 in US meat packing plants, with at least 70 deaths. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of animals are being culled, under atrocious conditions because these massive plants have had to shut production down, and the small abattoirs that could have taken in the livestock, have long since been forced out of business.
The carnage in Latin America, the new epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been particularly severe. With the global economy at a near standstill, agribusiness in the region has continued functioning with total impunity, deepening its impact and harm on communities and ecosystems. In almost all the countries in the region, agro-industrial activities have been exempted from quarantine, as they are considered "essential", even though their focus is on exports, not on providing food to local people.
For example, Ecuador's government issued a state of emergency decree paralysing the country, but ensuring that "all export chains, agricultural industry, livestock [industry] ... will continue to function." As a result, workers in the banana and palm plantations, seafood factories, flower farms, and many more, were forced to continue working as if the country was not under a health emergency, thereby exposing themselves to the risk of contracting Covid-19.
Similarly, the Bolsonaro government in Brazil declared that the production, transport and general logistics of export food chains were essential activities that must continue functioning without restrictions. In this context, exports of meat, soybeans and other commodities are surging - as are the numbers of people exposed to Covid-19 along the export chains. In the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, a meat export hub, more than a quarter of the confirmed novel coronavirus cases in May were among meat plant workers. Labour prosecutors are now fighting to close infested plants and force companies to implement even basic measures to protect and care for their workers during the pandemic.
Brazil's soybean exports, which are up 38 percent from last year, are another potential hotspot for Covid-19, especially at the ports where trucks and workers are constantly circulating. When the local government of the port town of Canarana in Mato Grosso tried to take action by issuing a decree to pause the export of soybeans and other grains in the absence of proper health and safety conditions, the agribusiness giants Louis Dreyfus and Cargill intervened and were able to reverse the decree within a few days. Canarana is now, in early June, seeing a surge in Covid-19 infections.
All this export frenzy has a tremendous impact on the ground. According to Deter, the real-time detection system of the Brazilian national space research institute, deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil has increased by more than 50 percent in these first three months of 2020 - at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, in comparison to the previous year's first quarter. Taking advantage of the pandemic smoke screen, with fewer inspection agents able to carry out inspection, agribusiness and mining operations are advancing on protected areas and indigenous territories, increasing the contagion of Covid-19 in indigenous populations. Many observers fear a genocide as a result of these reckless advances of agribusiness and mining operations during the pandemic.
Such brazen corporate profiteering is creating a legitimacy crisis for the corporate food system.Amidst the national quarantine in Argentina, soybean exports and forest clearings have not ceased either. In one of the most preserved forests in the entire Gran Chaco ecosystem, an area of 8,000 hectares is being prospected for clearing. Furthermore, based on monitoring with satellite imagery, Greenpeace denounced that almost 10,000 hectares were cleared in the North of the country since the lockdown began.
Such brazen corporate profiteering is creating a legitimacy crisis for the corporate food system. Although the lockdowns make it difficult to measure, the ground appears to be shifting: we see workers in the food industry speaking out, organising and getting more support and solidarity from others; we see increasing interest among consumers in healthy, local foods and the well-being of food producers and farmers; and there's been an undeniable boom in community-oriented efforts to get food to where it's needed through solidarity, mutual aid, volunteer work and cooperatives. There's even been some victories at the policy level, such as the German government's recent decision to ban sub-contracted labour in meat plants and another to prevent companies taking public aid from paying out dividends.
But this is a powerful industry, with ample amounts of cash and political connections at its disposal, and there is no doubt that it will do everything it can to use this moment of confusion and lockdowns to advance its interests. We have already seen this with the executive order that US President Trump issued at the behest of JBS, Tyson, Cargill and other meat corporations to keep their Covid-infested plants running. We have also seen it in Brazil where the Bolsonaro government approved a record 96 new pesticides in the first months of 2020, more than all the approvals for 2019. The same government deliberately used the cover of the pandemic to try and pass a law that would legalise land grabs and deforestation covering 80 million hectares in the Amazon and Cerrado regions. The pandemic has also been used as an opportunity to rapidly expand e-commerce in food retail and push ahead with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in Ethiopia and in Bolivia, where the de-facto government claimed that the Covid-19 health emergency made GM seeds a necessity for the country.
Agribusiness as big winner from new wave of structural adjustment
Worse is yet to come. Many governments are employing global consulting firms, like McKinsey, to shape their plans to open their economies back up. These secretive firms which are deeply connected to the world's largest corporations, including those from the food and agribusiness sector, will no doubt influence who emerges as winners and losers from the pandemic responses-- workers or bosses, farmers' markets or e-commerce giants, fisherfolk or the trawling industry.
We are also seeing the IMF and World Bank use their Covid-19 emergency funds to push countries into implementing agribusiness-friendly reforms. In the Ukraine, for example, a law privatising farmland was implemented despite the opposition of a majority of Ukrainians. In the coming months, such pressures will escalate. Dozens of countries are heading for defaults, and those debts will have to be negotiated not only with the IMF and bilateral lenders, but also with private creditors who have already indicated that they are not interested in even delaying debt and interest payments during this health crisis. A new wave of structural adjustment is on the way that will focus heavily on increasing foreign agribusiness investment and exports of agricultural commodities to pay off the vultures.
This time, however, governments are going to find it incredibly difficult to impose a new round of agro-imperialism on populations that have already had more than enough of it, and that are increasingly hungering for the alternatives that social movements have been advancing for decades.
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Remembering Colombian Land Defender Hernan Bedoya
"A year before he died, Hernán warned the palm oil companies planned to plant another 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres), which would be impossible unless he and more than a dozen other campesinos were dispossessed."
Aug 19, 2019
The United Nations has highlighted that human rights defenders play an important role in helping to avert further climate breakdown.
The Global Climate Strike on September 20 and September 27 is an opportunity for people around the world concerned by climate change to acknowledge that role and the risks land and environmental defenders face.
On July 30, the Global Witness report 'Enemies of the State?' highlighted that 164 land and environment defenders were killed in 2018.
That report specified that in 2018: 24 land and environment defenders were killed in Colombia, 16 in Guatemala, 14 in Mexico, 4 in Honduras, 2 in Kenya, and 1 in Indonesia.
That report notes that among the key resource sectors that are driving the violence against human rights defenders is agribusiness.
That report notes that among the key resource sectors that are driving the violence against human rights defenders is agribusiness.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has reported, "Unfortunately, because current palm oil production methods often cause the destruction of carbon-rich tropical forests and peatlands, it is a major contributor to global warming."
In 2012, the top palm oil producing countries included Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala. Colombia is the fourth-largest producer globally and the largest in Latin America.
Danilo Rueda is with the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, an organization accompanied by the Peace Brigades International-Colombia Project.
In an interview with PBI-Colombia, Rueda says, "Palm oil means death because of the violence it brings with it and because of the environmental damage it causes. Because big business, hand in hand with Colombian and international policy, is destroying water sources and flora and fauna by depleting the forests. This is capitalist logic, which favours the accumulation of capital, and in the long term, the effects are highly negative."
The death of Afro-Colombian land rights activist Hernan Bedoya has been linked to the expansion of the palm oil industry in that country.
The Guardian has reported, "Bedoya was shot 15 times on 5 December [2017] while he was riding his horse to the vet in Pedeguita y Mancilla, Choco."
That article explains, "A year before he died, Hernan warned the palm oil companies planned to plant another 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres), which would be impossible unless he and more than a dozen other campesinos were dispossessed."
And it notes, that the "leader of the opposition to palm oil plantations -- was assassinated by a gang linked to agribusiness and narco-traffickers. ...[His son believes] his father's death was ordered by a politician, who secures land for businesses with the hired muscle of the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia."
The writing in the PBI-Colombia photo included at the top of this article reads: "Sin olvido (we will not forget you) Hernan Bedoya."
Hernan has not been forgotten and his story will be remembered and recounted by PBI-Canada during the Global Climate Strike next month.
A 4-minute video featuring Hernan shared by the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, Frontera Invisible and Transport & Environment can be seen here.
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Dear Democrats: We Owe Migrants More Than "Decriminalization"
U.S. policies have created the disasters from which they are fleeing.
Jul 30, 2019
Like many citizens of the United States, I was pleased to hear the consensus condemnation of President Trump's punitive migration policies from Democratic presidential candidates during the last debate. Granted, It does not take much courage to condemn "holding children in cages." Still, it was heartening to hear support for "decriminalizing" migration. That would certainly be an improvement over the abusive policies now prevailing on the border.
But granting that many migrants at our southern border are not criminals falls far short of recognizing the complicity of our government in creating the multiple crises Central Americans and Mexicans are fleeing. We have a responsibility to those migrants for violations of their civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, because the U.S. government is significantly responsible for those violations.
It is time for Democrats to go just beyond just opposing the border wall, stopping child detentions, and decriminalizing migration. Migrants certainly are not criminals for fleeing conditions the U.S. government helped create. They are victims.
To this end, I would ask all Democratic candidates to raise their hands in the next debate if they would support adding the following items to the questions posed to migrants when they are apprehended or questioned at our border:
1. Are you fleeing gun violence? Since the US is the source of 70% of the guns used by criminals in Mexico, and nearly half in Central America, we feel a particular responsibility to welcome victims of U.S.-made guns.
2. Are you fleeing gang violence? Because many of the Central American gangs gained strength when the US deported Central Americans who had been recruited into gangs in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities after fleeing civil wars we precipitated, we bear some responsibility for such organized crime.
3. Are illegal drugs the source of the gang violence you are fleeing? The U.S. is overwhelmingly responsible for the drug trade because U.S. consumers are by far the largest source of demand for the drugs being trafficked through Central America and Mexico. We owe special consideration to the victims of drug-related violence.
4. Are you fleeing government repression? The U.S. government has armed and heavily funded the governments of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. We provoked a civil war in El Salvador. We supported a coup against the elected government of Honduras in 2009 and then backed the fraudulent election of the current Honduran president in 2017. We oversaw the genocide of indigenous people by the Guatemalan government in the 1980s. So political refugees fleeing U.S.-backed regimes deserve special consideration for asylum.
5. Have you left your home because imported goods from the U.S. undermined your livelihood after a trade agreement? Did you grow corn and then found you had no market for your crop because subsidized U.S. corn was pouring into your country at prices below what it cost to produce, a form of agricultural dumping outlawed by the World Trade Organization? The U.S. owes the victims of such brazen trade policies compensation for such unfair practices.
6. Did you leave home because multinational firms have taken over your land for industrial farming, mining, or tourism and threatened those who resist displacement? U.S. firms have a long history of such actions; today Hilton Hotels has displaced hundreds of native Garifuna people in Northern Honduras for an exclusive resort. A local Garifuna organization estimates that half of the people between the ages of 12 and 30 have migrated as the community has lost nearly three-quarters of its ancestral land. We recognize that we are responsible when U.S. companies violate human rights abroad.
7. Did you leave home because your land was taken over to produce sugar, palm oil, soybeans, corn, or one of the other biofuel crops? U.S. biofuel policies have put added pressure on land in places like Central America where such crops can be grown cheaply, yet the hidden costs to the rural poor are devastating. We should extend a welcoming hand to anyone who has been displaced by U.S. demand for biofuel crops.
8. Were you compelled to migrate because climate change destroyed your livelihood, such as with the persistent drought that has plagued Central America in recent years? The U.S. is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), yet our current president denies climate change exists. Your countries contributed almost none of the GHGs that cause climate change, so there is a particular climate debt we owe to people of your country. The least we can do is welcome refugees from the climate disasters we have created and continue to magnify.
Decriminalizing migration is a welcome, and humane, proposal. But recognizing our own role in the many insurmountable problems forcing migrants from their homes would put responsibility squarely where it belongs. Extending a welcoming hand at our southern border to the victims of harmful U.S. political and economic policies is, truly, the least we can do. The most we could do is stop pursuing policies that create migration in the first place.
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In Just One Decade, Corporations Destroyed 50 Million Hectares of Forest--An Area the Size of Spain
"These companies are destroying our children's future by driving us towards climate and ecological collapse."
Jun 11, 2019
Major corporations involved with commodities like beef, palm oil, and soya pledged in 2010 to end deforestation over the next decade--but instead of fulfilling that promise, a new Greenpeace International analysis found the companies are set to destroy at least 50 million hectares of forest worldwide by 2020.
"Our message to companies is simple: evolve your business to prevent climate and ecological breakdown."
--Anna Jones, Greenpeace U.K.That estimate--the environmental advocacy group noted in a statement announcing its Countdown to Extinction report (pdf) Tuesday--is comparable to the size of Spain.
It is also "a conservative estimate," the group said, based on a combination of data on deforestation, tree cover loss, and forecasting through 2019. Given recent increases in tree loss cover, "the actual figure could be much higher."
Companies named in the report include General Mills, IKEA, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg, L'Oreal, Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever.
Greenpeace released its new report as over a thousand corporate executives were in Vancouver for the global summit of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), a organization led by various CEOs that brings together retailers and manufacturers.
In 2010, the CGF's board approved a resolution to achieve zero net deforestation by 2020 "through the responsible sourcing of these key commodities--soy, palm oil, paper and pulp, and cattle--so that the sourcing of these key commodities will not deplete tropical rainforests."
The Greenpeace report, released just months away from the CGF's deadline, details how consumer goods companies have failed to meet the deforestation goal, and the consequences of it. As Greenpeace U.K.'s Anna Jones put it, "these companies are destroying our children's future by driving us towards climate and ecological collapse."
"They've wasted a decade on half-measures and in that time vast areas of the natural world have been destroyed," said Jones, the group's global project lead for forests. "They should be in crisis talks right now, but they're still trying to grow demand for products that will drive forest destruction even further."
The CGF told The Guardian in a statement Tuesday that "members have moved substantially closer to our goal of 100 percent sustainable sourcing of the four commodity groups. But over the last nine years we have also learned that the forces driving deforestation are more complex than almost any stakeholder realized in 2010."
Member companies, the newspaper reported, no longer see the "sustainable commodities" approach as effective, so they have spent the past 18 months working with outside stakeholders on a new strategy that will be discussed at the summit this week and unveiled during U.N. climate week in September.
As leaders of consumer goods companies have spent the past decade learning their approach was flawed from the start, the Greenpeace report explains, "the trade in high-risk commodities has boomed."
Since 2010, the area planted with soya in Brazil has increased by 45, Indonesian palm oil production is up 75 percent, and Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa footprint has grown by 80 percent. And the trend is set to continue: by 2050, global meat consumption (and hence production) is forecast to rise by 76 percent, soya production by nearly 45 percent, and palm oil production by nearly 60 percent.
"In the Congo Basin, we are witnessing widespread environmental and human rights violations in the name of development and the global commodities trade," said Victorine CheThoener of Greenpeace Africa. "It's all a kleptocracy where governments and companies collude to loot our natural resources and ordinary people pay the price."
Meanwhile, in Brazil, "the soya and cattle industries have been trashing the Cerrado--destroying the local environment, aggravating the climate crisis, and displacing and committing violence against Indigenous and traditional populations that have occupied the territory for hundreds of years," Romulo Batista of the group's local chapter said. "Global brands must bring their suppliers under control."
Greenpeace analyzed the devastation caused not only by members of the CGF, but also signatories to the New York Declaration on Forests and those that "had a cross-commodity forest protection policy, or had expressed on their websites an ambition, goal, or commitment to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains."
Earlier this year, the advocacy group asked more than 50 traders, retailers, producers, and consumer goods companies to "demonstrate their progress towards ending deforestation," the report says. "Not a single company was able to demonstrate meaningful effort to eradicate deforestation from its supply chain."
The report outlines how deforestation relates to recent warnings from global scientists about the rising likelihood of climate catastrophe and devastating biodiveristy loss unless the international community works together to rapidly reform energy, transportation, and agricultural systems.
Halting deforestation and restoring the world's forests is the cheapest and fastest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure rapid carbon uptake. In conjunction with phasing out fossil fuels, such action is essential if we are to limit global temperature rises to 1.5oC. Some 80 percent of global deforestation is a result of agricultural production, concentrated in tropical countries whose forests store enormous amounts of carbon and are most urgent to protect. The destruction of forests and other natural ecosystems by industrial agriculture is also wiping out the Earth's biodiversity: around 1 million species are now at risk of extinction.
Preventing climate and ecological breakdown requires 'transformative changes' to the way forest and agricultural commodities are produced, traded, and consumed, producing and consuming less meat and dairy, and phasing out crop-based biofuels and bioplastics. Such changes would also deliver major gains for human health and the health of our planet. Companies face a stark choice: clean up the industrial food system or clear out of the global commodities trade.
With the release Greenpeace's analysis, Jones said, "Our message to companies is simple: evolve your business to prevent climate and ecological breakdown."
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The Farms of the Future
If we all divest our time, energy and money from the corporations that fill megastores and supermarkets, and invest instead in ourselves, in local farmers and small local businesses, then we can keep money and precious resources circulating in our communities
Jun 05, 2019
Hou Xueying, a mother from Shanghai, was tired of food safety scares and of a city life disconnected from the land. So she moved her family to the country to learn about sustainable farming. Her parents disapproved; they had struggled to give her a comfortable life in the city--they could not understand why she would throw it away. When she got to the country, she found that the older generation of farmers could only tell her how to grow as they did, using chemical fertilizers, toxic insecticides.
Still, she persisted, and today she runs a diversified organic farm that is, in her words, a "self-reliant ecosystem." She raises a wide variety of animals and crops, making use of ingenious techniques--like allowing ducks into the rice paddies--to fertilize plants and eliminate pests without using chemicals. She's also turned her farm into a place of learning, teaching children from the city where their food comes from. Through all of this, Hou Xueying has found a community that shares her values for the first time. She believes that the importance of the farming way of life extends far beyond putting good food on the table. As she explains in the short film, Farmed with Love, "Only conscious foodies can save the world."
Many of us have heard some version of this statistic: the average age of farmers worldwide hovers around sixty years old. In the U.S., farmers over sixty-five outnumber farmers under thirty-five by a margin of six to one. People like Hou Xueying are going against the tide which has been tugging young people from the land for a long time, leaving older people alone on farms, with no one to take their place once they're gone (except, increasingly, robots). So truly, as this older generation of farmers retires--a generation that widely embraced large-scale industrial farming--the question grows more pressing: who will grow the food of the future and what will their farms look like?
Every person on earth needs food every day. Every day, food is tended, harvested, transported, stored, and served up on our tables. In a very real sense, food cannot be separated from life itself. And so it has been said that changing the way we grow and eat food is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our economies and society as a whole.
So when we ask: what will the farms of the future look like? We should really be asking--what do we want the future to look like? And then answers may begin to emerge.
Though many are enamored of technological solutions, others have pointed to tech's inescapable environmental impacts, to the way it strengthens corporate monopolies, and to the already evident, and as yet unforeseen, effects that it has on society, including on human health and happiness. When I look at the young people I know, at the issues that concern them most, four points of focus rise to the surface. These can be rather broadly categorized as: climate and the environment, diversity in its myriad forms, economic inequality, and a lack of community, loneliness. Young people don't want to work the land if that means working long hours for low pay, using dangerous chemicals, while the fruits of their labor are borne away to profit corporate executives they will never meet. But that doesn't mean a future in which we don't work the land at all. In fact, it means quite the opposite.
Climate change and agriculture are inextricably intertwined. Climate change and agriculture are inextricably intertwined.
As I'm sure many of us know by now, our globalized industrial food system is a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. The machinery and chemicals involved in industrial farming rely heavily on fossil fuels. So does packaging and refrigeration, not to mention the transport of food around the world by truck, ship, and plane. Many countries import and export nearly identical quantities of the same products. All of this creates economic activity, which adds to indicators of "progress" like GDP; not reflected in these numbers are the environmental costs of all the fossil fuels burned in the process. At the same time, more and more of the forests, grasslands, and wetlands that helped maintain the nearly perfect balance of the carbon cycle until the start of the industrial revolution are being cleared to make way for livestock or annual crops, which do not play the same role in sequestering carbon. This wreaks more havoc with the earth's natural climate-stabilizing systems.
On the other side of the coin, the changing climate is threatening agriculture as we know it. Increasingly extreme temperatures and weather events harm food crops. Studies show that the parts of the global South where people are already food insecure are being hit hardest. Many of these regions are less industrialized, less "developed" parts of the world, and so contributed little to the creation of this crisis--and yet, they are suffering the most.
In short, industrial monocultures -- those big farms you see with acres and acres of corn or soy, not to mention those giant cattle feedlots--are systems that degenerate, they die,over time. They produce more carbon emissions than they sequester. Their pesticides kill insects, including pollinators, a trend which may soon initiate "the collapse of nature." Every year, they suck the nutrients from the soil, and replace them with toxic chemicals. They draw water from local watersheds, pollute it, and let it run off into gutters, or evaporate when hot weather comes, rather than employing management techniques that would allow it to sink back down to replenish local aquifers. Eventually, land treated this way becomes barren, eroding away to create dead zones in rivers and oceans or being lifted up by the wind to join the particulate matter in the air, poisoning the lungs of human beings (it's telling that a recent report showed that Fresno and Bakersfield, in the heart of California's industrial farm-filled Central Valley, have the worst particulate pollution in the USA). The air is truly brown in such places. The crops grown on these farms are sent off by truck or ship to factories where they're processed and packaged--using more resources--and finally delivered to our homes, often in a form that's as bad for our bodies as the dust is for our lungs.
This is what agriculture looks like in a globalized corporate economy, where, like the nutrients from the soil, the livelihood is sucked from farming communities and siphoned up into the coffers of a few giant corporations.
This is what agriculture looks like in a globalized corporate economy, where, like the nutrients from the soil, the livelihood is sucked from farming communities and siphoned up into the coffers of a few giant corporations.
But as I'm sure many of us know by now, this is not what agriculture has to look like, by any means. Farms can be regenerative, living systems, that produce a bounty but no waste. They can supply the needs of a local community--if that community is willing embrace the idea of eating a mostly seasonal, locally adapted diet--with no need for long-distance transport by trucks, ships, or planes. Farms do not have to be net carbon emitters--plants absorb CO2 when they photosynthesize, and only emit it very slowly, through respiration and decomposition; studies show that, if managed correctly, farms, orchards, and even animal grazing systems can become places that sink and sequester CO2.
Not only that, but these are the same kinds of diversified farming systems that make people most resilient in the face of climate change. If we grow one kind of bean, for example, as a cash crop, and then the summer is too hot for that variety, we lose absolutely everything--all of our profits, which we would have used to buy food throughout the year. If we grow a diverse variety of crops, however, all with slightly different climactic limitations, then not only will a heat wave fail to do us in, but we can feed ourselves, right from our own backyards, no matter what happens. In fact, there are many points in favor of small diversified farms. Even minimal diversification has been shown to increase crop yields, while intensive permaculture systems--which have only recently been recognized by science -- have the potential to completely transform our concept of productivity, and of what a "farm" is.
But that's only the beginning.
When we talk about "diversified farms," we usually mean crop diversity. But there is also wild biodiversity, human diversity, cultural diversity, language diversity, diversity in ways of thinking and being--all of which oppose the corporate consumer human monoculture which is so swiftly, insidiously spreading. Researchers have correlated biodiversity with language diversity, while others have found that certain regions function as "bio-cultural refugia," harboring "place specific social memories related to food security and stewardship of biodiversity." It's easy to see these ideas brought to life in the context of a local food culture--crop varieties, local species and geography, language, and other aspects of culture like food preparation, celebrations, ways of passing knowledge on to the next generation, are all intimately connected. Lose any one element and the whole system is threatened. Colonizers have long removed Indigenous people from their land knowing that this in turn will deprive them of their food culture, and so make them dependent on the colonizer's economy--creating widening ripples of destruction.
In the same way that a colonizing culture hopes to put the world to work for a single purpose (usually, creating wealth for a specific set of colonizing elites) vast industrial farms destroy diverse ecosystems and replace them with a single species, like corn. This has been a driving force behind the sixth mass extinction which is urgently threatening all life on earth. But human beings are animal species too, after all, who could be playing supportive roles in diverse ecosystems, rather than acting as agents of destruction. In fact, corn now has a bad reputation in many parts of the world, but the corn, and the humans who first helped it to evolve thousands of years ago, are not to blame. There are few things more beautiful than the gemlike kernels of the heirloom corn varieties which long provided the basis of a healthy, vibrant, balanced diet for people throughout what is now Mexico and the United States--and which still does so for some today. These varieties are adapted to be drought-resistant, to withstand extremes of heat or cold, and are integral to many aspects of the cultures that rely upon them for survival.
This brings us back to the idea of a changing climate, of extremes. Over all the years that people have been planting seeds, they have been participating in a process of evolutionary adaptation: they've been selecting the seeds that thrived in their particular soil, with their particular weather conditions, their particular light. Seeds banks are great--especially those that save only Indigenous, non-corporate patented varieties; but they are not enough. We need living seed banks, seeds planted every year--eased into an uncertain future--if we want a real hope for survival.
Not only that, but farmers who grow a single crop for export instead of growing for their local community are at the mercy of another force as volatile the weather: the global economy. Many of us remember The Grapes of Wrath, the image of men dousing oranges with kerosene, throwing potatoes into the river and guarding them with guns, while the children of the migrant laborers looked on, starving. Modern versions of this still happen. Millions of people are hungry, and yet the amount of food we waste every day is absolutely staggering.
As John Steinbeck wrote, back in 1939, in a passage that still captures the essence of the global food system today:
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange."
Of course, the global economy in general is vastly unequal. This relates to the food system in different ways in different parts of the world. In wealthy, industrially developed countries, fresh, local, organic foods are generally thought of as being accessible only to high-income people (and to a great extent this is true), while organic farming is thought of as an occupation accessible only to people with privilege (also true, in some cases). Meanwhile, in the less "developed" world, locally grown and adapted foods, along with farming, are often stigmatized as backward, while the fat and sugar-filled processed foods that have wreaked havoc with the health of the developed world are held up as symbols of the future.
I believe that it's generally wrong to tell anyone what they should or should not be eating, but it is important to question these kinds of assumptions. At the moment, high quality, local, organic food is a symbol of privilege in developed countries. But this is due to a rigged economic system--in which tax laws, trade agreements, government subsidies, and absolutely outrageous advertising budgets for things like sugary drinks and processed foods, systematically bolster multinational corporations--and not because of any quality inherent to the food itself. Once, not so long ago, it was the less economically privileged people who grew fresh, heirloom organic produce--of a quality that many of us can only dream about today--in backyards, on farms, in empty lots. Today, we think of processed and fast foods as being the cheapest options. But this, again, is because governments are doling out subsidies to corn and soy farmers, raising insurance and loan rates on fruit and veggie farmers, and handing ever more power to big business. We think of growing one's own food as something that is only accessible to those with privilege, and to a great extent this is true as well. Land is prohibitively expensive, and time, under capitalism, is the most scarce, the most precious resource of all. The typical CEO is paid 162 times what his low-level employees make per year, and so many must work multiple jobs and eighty-hour weeks if they want to feed their families. Of course, the poor quality of affordable foods contributes to health problems that take up more time and increase financial burdens.
These are horrible structural injustices, and the structures that perpetrate them have to be dismantled. Yet, while the food system is a great place to start, we must not forget that many of the people who have been responsible for growing food over the last several hundred years have done so in the context of slavery, or of exploitative tenant or migrant farming, leaving legacies of trauma connected to land and food that cannot, and should not, be easily forgotten.
However, despite these absolutely undeniable wrongs, many are beginning to agree that without food sovereignty (defined here as,"The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems,") we cannot have meaningful control over our lives, or our futures. As Leah Penniman, of Soul Fire Farm in Albany, New York, points out, there is a lot of racism built into the food system -- food apartheid, as she describes it--and the separation of certain people from land and good food has not been an accident. She is one of many at the forefront of a movement that is reconnecting systemically marginalized people to land and to food. This can be as simple as growing fresh food in vacant lots, on rooftops, on the grounds of community buildings like libraries, schools, churches. "Crop swaps," or movements like #FoodIsFree -- ways of trading produce for low or no cost--are amazing solutions that not only equalize the local food game, but also bring people together, building real community.
Meanwhile, in the global South, some are rejecting the idea that leaving the land for polluted, overpopulated cities is a sign of progress. One's income might be higher working in an urban sweatshop than it would be in a rural village. But that increased income does not necessarily reflect an increased quality of life. In villages where people own their own land and live as they have for generations--using clean water, eating local foods, making clothes and other goods from locally sourced materials, relying on community support for things like child care--a comfortable life can cost almost nothing. (This is why corporate land grabs, for purposes like mining, logging, oil drilling and factory farming, are among the most pressing human rights issues of our time.) In confirmation of this, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN has declared that small family farming is the only way to feed a growing population, while the economic powers that be have confirmed it by creating a climate in which those who fight for land rights must fear for their lives.
The creation of local food economies can play a meaningful role in equalizing society as a whole.
In the end, you could say it comes down to this: if we all divest our time, energy and money from the corporations that fill megastores and supermarkets, and invest instead in ourselves, in local farmers and small local businesses, then we can keep money and precious resources circulating in our communities. When we do so, the creation of local food economies can play a meaningful role in equalizing society as a whole. And there are added benefits. When people and local governments reclaim their resources, it weakens the economic power of corporations, and strengthens democracy. Not only that, but societies that don't leave people desperate are societies where people are less likely to turn against each other. There is the potential for a decline in xenophobia and conflict, and for diverse communities to unite, instead, against the real enemies: those who profit enormously off a system of gross injustice, and inequality.
Nashira is an urban ecovillage near the Colombian city of Cali. It is run entirely by women, most from low-income families, and many of whom were left as single mothers by decades of civil conflict. Other women living at Nashira are survivors of domestic or sexual abuse. All are looking for a safe place to raise children, and a way to put food on the table.
Nashira can provide them with both--and more. It is a self-sustaining ecovillage, with a matriarchal democratic system of governance, that is built and operates on strict ecological principles. The fact that Nashira residents grow their own food as a community, as well as producing and selling sustainable food for income, has given a lot of these women and their families true safety, freedom, and stability for the first time in their lives.
Around the world, ecovillages more or less like Nashira are emerging. They are home to every kind of person, and yet they tend to share one thing in common: a focus on the importance of growing food as a community for sustainability, economic independence, health, and happiness.
There has been a lot of discussion about how best to name our time in history--the "Technological Age," perhaps?--but George Monbiot has declared that it can most accurately be described as "The Age of Loneliness." Our mental health statistics are grim--including, notably, the suicide statistics for farmers struggling in the industrial food system (here are some from the USA and India). We work long hours and are dependent on a few corporations for all of our basic needs (looking at you, Amazon), while technology is allowing for ever fewer human interactions (many people I know have their groceries delivered while they're at work, and never see the inside of a store at all). While online communities have emerged that do serve beneficial purposes, it's simply not enough. Human beings are social animals. We're evolved to rely upon each other--for everything. We're calmed by interdependent, mutually beneficial relationships, by support and sharing. We're also calmed, strengthened, and satisfied by working with living plants and animals, especially when, by doing so, we're securely able to feed our families. Around the world, growing food has proven beneficial for prisoners, school children, youth in foster care,unhoused peoples and trauma survivors.
And of course, we all know that there's nothing better than food for bringing people together. Whether it's organizing a work party to pick berries, planning produce-trading parties, preparing potlucks for celebration, or simply running into friends at a local market during daily shopping, the interactions we have in the context of a local food culture make the world a less lonely place.
Ok, so the farms of the future should be regenerative, diverse, accessible, community-oriented, places of celebration. But for many of us--in particular those who are interested in actually becoming farmers -- there are still a lot of barriers in the way of getting started.
The cost of land is the biggest. In the USA, between 1992 and 2012, three acres of farmland were lost to development every minute. Particularly near urban centers--where organic farmers find their largest markets--real estate developers are able to pay so much more than farmers can afford (banks are nervous about lending to farmers under the best of circumstances, and for young farmers starting out with student debt the prospects are even worse). At the moment, with real estate developers making bank on new developments, GDP rising when food is transported across national borders, and the fossil fuel industry still benefiting from long distances between growers and consumers--as bizarre as that sounds in our burning world--there remains little incentive for those in power to change this system. Fortunately, a number of organizations and local governments have taken on the difficult work of exploring alternative models of land ownership, setting up farmland trusts, and giving low or no interest loans to beginning farmers. Models like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), in which community members pay for food shares at the start of a growing season, provide farmers with critical financial safety nets that help them stay afloat.
Gaining rights to water and finding land not contaminated by industry can present further obstacles. So can overcoming expectations like, "I'm entitled to eat fresh strawberries in winter no matter where I live"--when in fact, eating seasonal, locally adapted produce is likely to lead to a higher quality overall diet, especially for those willing to take it on as a creative challenge. The same goes for countering statements like "organic agriculture is less productive," or "small farms cannot feed the world." While the first may sometimes appear to be true if you're comparing organic versus conventional large scale production of the same crop, the statistics are usually cherry-picked to support corporate interests, and the whole conversation shifts if you expand your discussion to include different agricultural models--like highly diversified, integrated systems. When it comes to comparing large versus small farms, a lot of data is already in: small or medium family farms produce over 80% of the world's food, using only 12% of the agricultural land. A huge problem lies in the fact that, to a very alarming extent, big agribusiness funds agricultural research in universities.
Then there are the challenges of obtaining local farming knowledge, particularly in regions where most people left the land long ago. Finally, there is the difficulty of overcoming stigmas, as Hou Xueying had to do, against working the land--fighting the idea that a farming life is "backward" and not modern--following these ideas to their source and cutting them off at the roots. We can only hope that as new food cultures take shape, and old ones evolve the world over, this process is able to spread and grow of its own accord.
Fortunately, this growth has already begun.
People around the world are hard at work creating diverse, living versions of the farms of the future. As a way of life, it would be nice to think that it could really catch on, and one day be accessible to most of us. We'll just need to continue fighting for access, giving one another support, unearthing the solid, tangible proof that a local food future is real, and not some fantasy we'll soon abandon, a vague dream of what might have been, that we talk about in bitter tones while the robots get on with the planting.
For more local food inspiration, see Local Futures' curated collection of short films on food and farming.
Originally published by Local Futures
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"Great Collection of #KeepItInTheGround Leaders" Awarded This Year's Goldman Prize
The six recipients of the annual environmental award are from Chile, the Cook Islands, Liberia, Mongolia, North Macedonia, and the United States
Apr 29, 2019
From preserving marine biodiversity to protecting tropical forests from palm oil developers, the six recipients of a prestigious environmental award are "extraordinary individuals who have moved mountains to protect our planet."
"Each of them has selflessly stood up to stop injustice, become a leader when leadership was critical, and vanquished powerful adversaries who would desecrate our planet."
--Susie Gelman, Goldman Environmental Foundation
That's according to the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which for the past 30 years has honored grassroots activists from across the globe. This year's winners, described on Twitter by fellow activist Bill McKibben as "a great collection of #KeepItInTheGround leaders," were announced Monday.
Each of the six recipients hails from one of the world's inhabited continents.
Environmental lawyer Alfred Brownell is being recognized for his successful efforts to stop palm oil plantation developers from destroying forests vital to biodiversity in his home country of Liberia. For safety reasons--and after his government threatened to arrest Brownell for his activism--he now lives in exile in the United States.
Brownell told The Guardian about an encounter with private security guards in 2016.
"They threatened to cut off my head, to eat my heart, and drink out of my skull," Brownell said. "They began a war dance around the car. They were drinking and said they would cannibalize me."
Brownell added that receiving the honor has made him optimist about returning to Liberia in the future: "I hope this award will help change the minds of people in Liberia so we find more allies to speak to the government and the company. We need to find a way to engage with them so I can go home."
Bayarjargal Agvaantseren, of Mongolia, was selected for her work to establish the Tost Tosonbumba Nature Reserve in the South Gobi Desert--which is home to the snow leopard, a vulnerable species threatened by mining in the area. Due in part to pressure from Agvaantseren, the Mongolian government has canceled all mining licenses in the reserve.
Alberto Curamil--a Mapuche, Chile's largest indigenous group--organized the people of Araucania to block the construction of two hydroelectric projects that could have diverted more than 500 million gallons of water daily from the Cautin River, with dire consequences for the regional ecosystem. Curamil was arrested for his activism last year and remains in jail.
The first-ever recipient from North Macedonia, Ana Colovic Lesoska, campaigned against a pair of hydropower plants. The campaign she led convinced key international backers to pull their funding for the projects in the Mavrovo National Park, one of the last habitats for the endangered Balkan linx. She, too, has faced consequences for her activism.
"I've received death threats and warnings that I will be imprisoned," she told the The Guardian. "Newspaper articles have suggested we are aiding foreign governments just because the rivers we are protecting run to Albania."
Jacqueline Evans, of the Cook Islands, is also the first person from her country to receive the Goldman prize. Evans fought for legislation to restrict large-scale commercial fishing and seabed mining around her nation's 15 islands to safeguard south Pacific marine biodiversity--including whales, sea turtles, manta rays, seabirds, and sharks.
The North American recipient, Linda Garcia, was among the activists who blocked the construction of the continent's largest oil terminal, which was set to be built in Vancouver, Washington. Garcia organized residents of Fruit Valley, a racially diverse, low-income neighborhood whose air would have been impacted by the project.
"Each of them has selflessly stood up to stop injustice, become a leader when leadership was critical, and vanquished powerful adversaries who would desecrate our planet," Susie Gelman, president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. "These are six ordinary, yet extraordinary, human beings who remind us that we all have a role in protecting the Earth."
The foundation planned an award ceremony in San Francisco for Monday evening featuring a speech from former Vice President Al Gore, a vocal environmental activist. The event will be broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, with updates posted on social media using the hashtag #GoldmanPrize30. A second ceremony is scheduled for May 1 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
"Thirty years ago, when Richard and Rhoda Goldman started the Goldman Environmental Prize, the idea of celebrating grassroots environmentalists was a novel one," said Gore, a friend of the founders. "Today, thanks in large part to the Goldmans, the world recognizes just how important it is to honor and illuminate those who have shown courage in the face of environmental destruction."
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Decrying 'Toxic Alliance' of Macron and Polluters, Climate Campaigners Stage One of France's Largest Ever Acts of Civil Disobedience
"Instead of regulating the activities of these polluting multinationals, Emmanuel Macron is rolling out the red carpet!"
Apr 19, 2019
Parts of a major business district just outside of Paris city limits were "paralyzed" Friday when more than 2,000 climate campaigners staged what organizers described as one of France's largest ever acts of civil disobedience.
"We want to show that in reality, it is here that France's climate policy is decided, in the offices of the big bosses."
--Clement Senechal, Greenpeace France
Peaceful demonstrators descended on La Defense to protest government complicity and companies fueling the global climate crisis.
Carrying signs that condemned Emmanuel Macron as "president of polluters," the protesters blocked access to the buildings of three major businesses and the Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition.
The direct action was organized by Action Non-Violente (ANV) COP21 and the French chapters of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, but members of at least 14 climate groups reportedly joined the mass mobilization.
"Through this action of extraordinary civil disobedience, the French climate movement denounces the toxic alliance that Emmanuel Macron and his government maintain with the large companies whose activity accelerates climate change, while radical and immediate action is needed to limit global warming to +1.5degC by the end of the century," organizers said in a statement in French, referencing a key target of the Paris climate accord.
The demonstration in France came as the climate activism group Extinction Rebellion is spearheading an International Rebellion Week featuring similar civil disobedience in London. The group's French arm supported the action Friday:
The three companies campaigners targeted were fossil fuel giant Total, a major producer of planet-warming emissions; investment bank Societe Generale, which pours billions of dollars into dirty energy projects each year; and Electricite de France (EDF), the state-run electric utility that, according to protest organizers, produces only about 10 percent of renewable energy compared with more than 70 percent of nuclear energy.
"Instead of regulating the activities of these polluting multinationals, Emmanuel Macron is rolling out the red carpet!" said Cecile Marchand of Friends of the Earth France.
Marchand pointed out that last year, Macron's government gave Total the green light to import palm oil, despite the European Parliament's decision to ban such imports by 2021. She also slammed government investment in nuclear power and failures to block big banks from funding dirty energy development.
The French president, Marchand said, "firmly defends banks like Societe Generale against any attempt to regulate and refuses to supervise them to put an end to their investments in fossil fuels."
"By displaying Emmanuel Macron at La Defense, and blocking the activity of several strategic locations in this business district," said Greenpeace France climate campaign manager Clement Senechal, "we want to show that in reality, it is here that France's climate policy is decided, in the offices of the big bosses."
The blockades in France came as students across the globe skipped classes and took to the streets as part of the weekly #FridaysForFuture school strikes--inspired by the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg's solitary protests launched last year to demand bolder efforts from global policymakers to stave off climate catastrophe.
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New Study Confirms: Degenerative Food & Farming System Poses Mortal Threat
By transitioning to regenerative food, farming and land-use practices, we can reverse global warming and produce healthier food
Jan 27, 2019
A new study calling for a "radical rethink" of the relationship between policymakers and corporations reinforces what Organic Consumers Association and other public interest groups have been saying for years: Our triple global health crises of deteriorating public health, world hunger and global warming share common root causes--and that the best way to address these crises is to address what they all have in common: an unhealthy, inequitable food system perpetuated by a political and economic system largely driven by corporate profit.
The study, the result of three years of work by 26 commissioners from several countries, was released this week by the Lancet Commission on Obesity. Boyd Swinburn, a University of Auckland professor and co-chair of the commission, as reported by Channel News Asia, said:
"Until now, undernutrition and obesity have been seen as polar opposites of either too few or too many calories. In reality, they are both driven by the same unhealthy, inequitable food systems, underpinned by the same political economy."
According to the report, nearly a billion people are hungry and another 2 billion are eating too much of the wrong foods, causing epidemics of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
Boyd said that malnutrition in all its forms, including undernutrition and obesity, is by far the biggest cause of ill health and premature death globally, and that both are expected to be made "significantly worse" by climate change.
A familiar, but welcome call for reform
We have long called for the reform of our degenerative industrial agriculture system. We've drawn attention to the impact of industrial agriculture on global warming and deteriorating health. And we've highlighted the remarkable potential for organic regenerative agriculture to naturally draw down and sequester carbon, through nature's own photosynthesis.
We've also called on global policymakers to connect the dots between degenerative agriculture, poor health and climate change.
We've said all along that the influence of self-serving corporations over policy is largely to blame for U.S. and global policymakers' collective failure to address our degenerative food and farming system, and the devastation that system has wrought on human health and the environment.
This latest study comes at a time when climate scientists have sounded their most urgent and alarming warnings to date. It also comes at a time of keen interest in a Green New Deal, whose backers are calling for nothing less than radical solutions to the most pressing issues of our time.
Degeneration Nation: the frightening truth
Welcome to Degeneration Nation, where the frightening truth is this: Big Food companies, fast food chains, chemical and seed giants such as Bayer/Monsanto, and corporate agribusiness, aided and abetted by indentured politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties, are slowly but surely poisoning us with unhealthy, nutrient-deficient, contaminated food.
The pesticides, GMOs, hormone disruptors and antibiotic residues in non-organic produce, grains and meat, coupled with the excessive sugar, salt and bad fats in the processed foods and beverages that make up the majority of the American diet, have supersized and degenerated the body politic. An epidemic of chronic diseases directly related to our toxic food and environment has spread across the U.S. and much of the world.
The overwhelming evidence is that human health is seriously deteriorating, and that the underlying causes of this health crisis are directly related not only to our highly toxic industrial practices, but also to our degenerate food, farming and land-management practices.
In the agricultural sector alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies more than 1,400 pesticides and 1,800 so-called "inerts" chemicals in use, in addition to a toxic stew of animal drugs, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers and GMOs. Few of these have been properly tested, singly or in combination, for safety.
The public health and economic consequences of our degraded environment and food system are alarming. A recent Rand Corporation study found that 60 percent of Americans suffer from at least one chronic health condition, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and arthritis; 42 percent have two or more; and that these chronic diseases now account for more than 40 percent of the entire U.S. health care spending of $3.5 trillion.
One out of every two Americans will get cancer at least once in their lifetime. According to recent research, U.S. men born in 1960 have a lifetime cancer risk of 53.5 percent. For women, it's 47.5 percent.
Seventy percent of U.S. drinking water is contaminated with Monsanto's top-selling herbicide, Roundup, while 93 percent of consumers now have traces of this toxic poison (active ingredient glyphosate) in our urine.
The authors of "What's Making Our Children Sick?" report that one in 13 U.S. children have serious food allergies; 6 - 24 percent have serious intestinal problems; 20 percent are obese; 60 percent have chronic headaches; 20 percent suffer from mental disorders and depression. One in every 41 boys and one in every 68 girls are now diagnosed with autism.
Beyond destroying our health, chemical and fossil fuel-intensive factory farms and GMO monocultures are polluting our water and air, degrading our soils, forests and wetlands, killing off biodiversity and heating up the planet.
The delicate rhythms of nature--the Earth's carbon cycle circulating between the atmosphere, oceans, soils and forests, the water or hydrological cycle and the climate--are unraveling.
Cook organic, not the planet
The Lancet Obesity Commission study is clear: Climate change, obesity and poor nutrition can all be linked in some way to the mass production of processed, nutrient-poor food. This is an idea that doesn't get as much attention as it should.
When most people think about climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the impact of fossil fuels--our non-renewable fossil fuel-based energy system for transportation and for utilities and manufacturing, including the construction and the heating and cooling of our homes, offices and buildings.
What few people understand is that a full 44-57 percent of all global GHG emissions are generated by chemical- and fossil fuel-intensive industrial farm production, food processing, packaging, refrigeration, transportation and destructive land-use practices, such as deforestation, heavy plowing, lack of cover crops and wetlands destruction.
Let's take a closer look at the 44-57 percent of human GHG emissions coming from our industrial, GMO, factory farm food system, and compare how transitioning to regenerative food, farming and land-management practices would not only drastically reduce these emissions, but actually draw down excess atmospheric carbon and sequester it in our soils, trees and wetlands--and in the process, produce more nutrient-dense, chemical-free food.
Direct use of oil and gas in farming: 11 to 15 percent
Most climate analysts agree that fossil fuel use on farms and ranches, including chemical farm inputs (fertilizers and pesticides), is responsible for at least 11-15 percent of all global CO2, methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Most of these emissions come from the use of fossil fuel-powered farm and irrigation equipment and petroleum-derived chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
In addition, the excess manure generated by factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) as the industry calls them, releases significant quantities of methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and the oceans.
How can we reduce these on-farm emissions? By converting chemical- and energy-intensive farms to organic and regenerative crop production and planned rotational grazing and free range livestock production. This will require a combination of conscious consumers and farmers working together, on a local-to-global scale to reject factory farm, GMO, chemically tainted, highly processed food, and radical changes in public policy and investment practices.
Food- and farming-derived deforestation: 15 to 18 percent
Global "land use change" or deforestation is generally recognized as contributing to approximately 20 percent of all GHG emissions over the past 200 years.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that expansion of agriculture, especially for export crops such as GMO soybeans (primarily for animal feed) in Latin America, or palm oil (for biofuels and processed food) in Asia, accounts for 70-90 percent of global deforestation.
Worldwide, industrial agriculture is pushing into grasslands, wetlands and forests, destroying what were previously carbon-sequestering forests and grasslands. Food and farming's contribution to deforestation thus accounts for 15-18 percent of global GHG emissions.
Over the next 50 years we need to preserve the forests we have left, and plant and nurture a trillion or more new trees. Since the areas of tropical forest deforestation are also the areas of greatest poverty and unemployment, reforestation and forest restoration can provide several hundred million jobs to those local residents and forest dwellers who need them most.
Food transport/food miles: 5 to 6 percent
Globally it is generally agreed that transportation accounts for 20-25 percent of all GHG emissions. According to the ETC group, "we can conservatively estimate that the transportation of food accounts for a quarter of global GHG emissions linked to transportation, or 5-6 percent of all global GHG emissions." In the U.S. it is commonly estimated that the average food item in your grocery store or restaurant has travelled 1,500 miles before it reaches its final destination. Multi-ingredient processed foods, burn up even more food miles.
If we are to significantly reduce global emissions we will need to drastically reduce the food miles and carbon footprint of our food purchases and focus on fresh non-processed or minimally processed and packaged food produced locally and regionally, including food produced through urban agriculture. Before the second World War most food consumed in the U.S. and other industrialized nations came from a 100-mile radius of where people lived. During the Second World War, 40-50 percent of all food consumed by Americans came from urban "Victory Gardens," while 30 percent of all food in Great Britain similarly came from urban gardens.
Food processing/packaging: 8 to 10 percent
Food processing has become a major part of the industrial food chain. In the U.S. , the overwhelming majority of food purchased in grocery stores or restaurants (70 percent) is processed food.
ETC group states that the " . . . transformation of foods into ready-made meals, snacks and beverages requires an enormous amount of energy, mostly in the form of carbon. So does the packaging and canning of these foods. Processing and packaging enables the food industry to stack the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores with hundreds of different formats and brands, but it also generates a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions--some 8 to 10 percent of the global total."
More and more consumers are recognizing that highly processed food, whether served at home or in fast food restaurants is bad for our health, and that wasteful packaging, misleading advertising and plastic bags and packages are harmful both to our health (especially children's health) and to our environment, including the oceans.
This awareness has caused a boom in sales of fresh organic produce and animal products in natural and organic food stores and farmer's markets. Many cities and even entire nations are now moving toward banning plastic bags. Unfortunately, U.S. consumers still spend almost half of their food dollars eating in restaurants and fast food outlets where highly processed, packaged foods dominate the menu. Similarly, in schools and cafeterias pre-cooked processed foods delivered by food service conglomerates have displayed hand-cooked meals prepared from fresh ingredients.
If we are to reduce the 8-10 percent of global fossil fuel emissions coming from food processing and packaging we will need to get back to healthy, organic, regionally produced foods, cooked from scratch with natural ingredients. This will not only benefit our health but will also be better for the health of the climate and the environment.
Food refrigeration & retail: 2 to 4 percent
Approximately 15 percent of all global electricity consumption is for cooling and refrigeration. Of course global food sourcing depends upon keeping fresh produce and animal products cold.
As ETC group says: "Considering that cooling is responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and that leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of GHGs, we can safely say that the refrigeration of foods accounts for some 1-2 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. The retailing of foods accounts for another 1-2 percent."
Again, reducing our food miles, buying locally and regionally--this is not only good for the planet, but good for our health and the economic well-being of our local farmers and ranchers as well. Until the electricity grid is converted over to renewable energy, food refrigeration, and refrigeration in general (especially air conditioning), will continue to belch out an unsustainable amount of greenhouse gases.
In the meantime we can all do our part, not only by turning down our thermostats, but by buying fresh foods produced locally and regionally, pressuring politicians to require local purchasing for schools and institutions, or better yet, by growing some of our own.
Throwing food into landfills instead of composting 3 to 4 percent
Our industrial food and farming system currently discards 30-50 percent of all the crops and the food that is produced. Not only is this a prodigious waste of the fossil fuel energy and labor involved in producing this food, but the food waste itself generally ends up in garbage dumps and landfills, (rather than being converted into compost) releasing substantial amounts of methane and other GHGs.
Quoting again from ETC Group: "Between 3.5-4.5 percent of global GHG emissions come from waste, and over 90 percent of these are produced by materials originating within the food system."
Our planet has five pools or repositories where greenhouse gases are absorbed and stored: the oceans, the atmosphere, the soils, vegetation (plants, especially perennial plants, grasses, and forests) and hydrocarbon deposits.
Our global challenge over the next 25 years is to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans, leave the remaining fossil fuels (oil, coal, uranium, and natural gas) in the ground, and move a critical mass of excess atmospheric carbon (250 billion tons of carbon) back into the soil, by transitioning to regenerative food, farming and land-use practices. By doing this we will not only be able to reverse global warming--we'll also produce healthier food and healthier people.
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