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Brazil's minister of the environment, Carlos Minc, held a press conference today in Brasília to discuss fluctuating deforestation rates in the Amazon. During the press conference, Minc mentioned Greenpeace's “Slaughtering the Amazon” report, calling it an important study and saying that he personally agrees with its overall recommendations, especially the need to trace the origins of meat products and our demand that the Brazilian government stop financing economic activities linked directly to deforestation.Minc said he agreed with a Greenpeace report on Sunday that Brazilian beef fueled destruction and that the government was complicit by funding it.But wait, there are more updates from the Amazon!
"This ministry shares the (report's) view. Cattle ranching today is the main culprit of deforestation," Minc said.
Eleven meat packers, 20 cattle ranches and 72 suppliers would be banned from receiving government funds earmarked to rescue the beef industry, which is in trouble due to the global financial crisis, Minc said.
They raised and bought cattle from illegally deforested land, he said.
"We can't have public money financing deforestation," said Minc, who complained last week about a lack of government support in carrying out his environmental agenda.
The Public Prosecution Office in Para State has sent the supermarket chains Carrefour, Wal-Mart and Pao de Acucar (controlled by the French group Casino) a recommendation to stop buying meat from animals raised in illegally cleared areas in the Amazon rainforest region. The prosecutors warn that if the companies disobey, they could be fined up to US$ 250 per kilo of product. Another 72 national companies that buy cattle products also received the recommendation.This past weekend, we released our report “Slaughtering the Amazon,” which exposed the supply chain by which these slaughterhouses and tanning companies who are responsible for Amazonian deforestation are supplying the demand for raw resources to make a variety of consumer products, from beef to boots. Our investigation found that popular name brands like Nike, Adidas, and Timberland could be using leather made from cattle raised on illegally deforested Amazon land.
The Prosecution Office also opened a billion-dollar lawsuit against 20 farms, a Bertin slaughterhouse, and another 10 companies of the cattle sector that operate in Para State, accusing them of avoiding forest regeneration in illegally deforested areas that were the object of previous fines. The lawsuit asks for the retention of the farm owners’ goods as well as payment of fines and compensation for environmental damage to society, seeks to establish an embargo of any activity in the areas that were illegally cleared, and demands the recovery of 557 thousand hectares to be reforested with native species. Because they bought cattle from these farms, slaughterhouses and tanning companies are considered co-responsible.
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mikeg
San Francisco, CA USA
I am a Web Editor for Greenpeace based out of San Francisco.
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What I DON'T agree with is the fact that to blatantly push someone's ideals onto another. Vegetarianism is something that one does by choice. It would be like pushing a religion on another person, they won't do it unless THEY want to. To do this usually equates into a backlash of some sort...Which, oddly enough, seems to be like me trying to push my friends/family/co-workers, to take energy conservation/environment issues seriously (Idiot Capitalist America syndrome).
your other mistake is in reading this as us "putting most of the blame on the shoe companies." perhaps you need to check out the report we released before you pass any more judgments. we don't put "most of the blame" on anyone -- there's plenty to go around.
what we did do is make a strategic decision to target these shoe companies and try to build them up into champions for solutions to Amazonian deforestation and climate change. i assure you, this decision was based very much on an analysis of the "real problem." not sure why you think we'd base it on anything less. we're not in the habit of creating campaigns for fake problems...
Paul L is right when he says that preaching veganism would be ineffective. we could try to push veganism on folks, but where would that get us? you can't honestly believe that we'll be able to convince enough people to up and quit eating meat quickly enough to save the Amazon by 2015, which is when Brazil has pledged to achieve Zero Deforestation as part of its commitments to stopping global warming. people simply love their meat; and i say that as a vegetarian for the past 8 years.
but everyone, or at least most everyone, can agree that it's wrong to chop down the Amazon rainforest to make leather for shoes. there are plenty of acceptable alternatives out there, including, for better or worse, leather shoes made from cows that weren't grazed on deforested Amazon. and if we mobilize enough people to call for it, then the shoe companies will respond. and if they start pushing the companies who supply them with leather to ensure that they're not getting any hides from Amazonian deforestation, then it suddenly becomes much less profitable for these cattle ranchers to cut down the Amazon for their cattle.
that is the bottom line: it shouldn't be profitable to cut down the Amazon and contribute to global warming. and that's what we're trying to achieve.