Demand for meat destroying Amazon; Smarter choices can go a long way to help

Deforestation in the Amazon can seem like a remote problem over which we have no control - but forest advocates say that's not true. They argue that smarter choices at the dinner table would go a long way toward safeguarding the world's largest rainforest.

What they have in mind might become clearer on a flight from Brazil's capital of Brasilia to Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon. If you look out the window halfway through the flight, you'll see a checkerboard landscape of farmland interspersed with remnant patches of forest.

This so-called “Arc of Deforestation,” which hugs the eastern and southern margins of Amazonia, is vast. You'll fly over it for the better part of an hour. It is dominated by industrial-sized soy plantations where the proteinrich legume is being grown for conversion to animal feed for livestock like pigs and chickens. The rest has been transformed into scrubby rangelands for grazing cattle.

What won't be apparent from the air is that the landscape below is the product of consumer demand that originated far from Brazil, in the United States and in Europe, and among the burgeoning middle class in newly developed nations like China. The world's rapidly increasing appetite for cheap meat is responsible for the clearing of millions of acres of tropical forest a year.

Some experts say that the best way to end this destruction - in Brazil and beyond - is to persuade consumers to purchase only meat products that have been sustainably produced on non rainforest cleared land. And that effort is underway.

In early 2021, the environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth launched an online advertising campaign to take rainforest-produced meat products out of supermarkets: #StopFeedingDeforestation, the hashtag read, accompanied by a bloody image of a jaguar speared by a fork.

“It's a symbol that, if you eat chicken, without knowing it, you are eating a jaguar because their habitat has been destroyed to produce the soybeans that the poultry are being fed,” explained Nico Muzi, former Europe director of Mighty Earth.

An estimated 1,470 jaguars in Brazil's Amazon rainforest were killed or displaced between 2016 to 2019 due to accelerated deforestation and the wildfires that were linked to it.

As a result of Mighty Earth's online jaguar campaign, large supermarket chains such as Tesco in Britain and Carrefour in France were inundated with emails from incensed customers demanding that they stop selling chicken and other meat products that were fueling deforestation in Brazil and Argentina.

Both companies pledged to eliminate meat produced with “deforestation” soy from their shelves. Other retailers in the United Kingdom and Australia have recently followed suit. Group LDC, Europe's largest poultry producer, also announced that it would stop buying soy from producers that destroyed native ecosystems or grabbed land from Indigenous communities.

It's part of a growing movement in Europe, where surveys show the public overwhelmingly rejects foods that help drive the destruction of the rainforest. Three years ago, France announced its intention to ban all deforestation imports by 2030. Denmark, the UK and the European Union itself are considering similar measures.

In arguably the biggest success to date, “the Norwegian salmon industry, which supplies about half of the world's farmed salmon, has cut all links to deforestation in their soy supply chains,” said Nils Hermann Ranum, whose Rainforest Foundation Norway helped to broker the deal. (Soy is the main component in fish feed.) “We now have an important producer of protein for human consumption that can claim to be fully deforestation free.”

Would American consumers be willing to act to prevent deforestation as Europeans have already begun to do? A report published by Yale University in 2020 called "Climate change and the American diet" found that roughly 1 in 4 Americans said they rewarded food companies that are taking steps to reduce their impact on the environment by buying their products at least once in the past 12 months.

But smart consumer choices alone may not be enough, argues Nancy Landrum, a professor in the business department at Loyola University Chicago. Ultimately, the government also needs to step in. Banning imports of commodity crops associated with deforestation, and providing financial incentives for buyers and suppliers who do the right thing are two "policy options that can force change," she said.

In October, US Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, together with Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., introduced legislation to ban commodities originating from illegally deforested land from entering the United States.

“Consumers simply cannot rely on the representations of corporations when they are deciding whether or not to purchase a product,” Schatz said in a phone interview in December. “Our bill will give people the security to be sure that what they're purchasing is not destroying ecosystems and kicking native people off of their land.”

Environmental groups in the United States are rallying behind the legislation. Some argue that the carbon-intensive meat industry should not just get reformed, but needs to be phased out to make way for more environmentally-friendly food production.

“The government and meat companies should invest in a Manhattan Project-scale project to bring plant-based and cultivated protein to scale,” Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, said. There may be "no greater step the Biden administration and Congress could take to act on climate,” he added. While such a move would be unlikely, President Joe Biden was among the leaders of more than 100 countries who pledged to end deforestation by 2030 at the recent UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Deforestation has been increasing since 2016 in the Amazon (largely for cattle pasture) and even more steeply in its sister biome to the south, the Cerrado, an area of mixed dry forests and grasslands half the size of Europe, which is rapidly being cleared for ranching and also to grow soy for animal feed. A combined area the size of New York City was destroyed in Brazil during the first five months of 2021. The United States banned beef imports from Brazil because of unsanitary conditions found in some of the country's meatpacking plants and animal health concerns in 2017, but the Trump administration reversed the measure in February 2020. Holly Gibbs, a land use scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, explained the move came after on-site inspections by the US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service found improvements in practices at six Brazilian beef production plants. Since then, she says, exports to the United States have been climbing to preban levels. Calls for a ban were renewed recently in response to a reported outbreak of mad cow disease in Brazil. Some Brazilian beef is making it into US supermarkets. An investigation published in the Guardian in early 2021 reported that food retailers Walmart, Costco and Kroger are selling Brazilian meat products linked to meatpacker JBS, the world's largest meat-processing company, which has been linked to deforestation.

“We are going to be eating the rainforest in our burgers,” Gibbs said. “This is our moment as Americans to step forward and leverage some pressure to save the world, by helping to save the Amazon, which is critically important for the future of our planet.”

But persuading consumers to buy only sustainable products is just half of the solution, according to Peter Elwin, the head of the food and land use program at the nonprofit Planet Tracker.