What Should We Do About Beef From The Amazon?

Blog on the Nature Conservancy. Really if we don't eat the beef from the Amazon are they going to stop cutting down the rain forest. David Cleary provides a perspective that is very informative.

Nature Conservancy Blog by David Cleary

"Then, in June, something extraordinary happened. Friends of the Earth in Brazil and Greenpeace in Europe came out with separate reports detailing the role of the beef industry in driving Amazon deforestation. There was a media firestorm. Within days, all the major Brazilian supermarket chains (Carrefour and Walmart among them) announced new policies banning the purchase of meat linked to deforestation in the Amazon. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth achieved in a couple of weeks what I’d tried to do for years with no success.

But there are big risks. Right now, none of the meat processing companies have any way of documenting land-use change in the ranches that supply their Amazon slaughterhouses, and thus no way of guaranteeing to the retailers that their meat is deforestation-free. Getting such a monitoring system up and running was the reason I was in that meeting in São Paulo. In those circumstances, the easiest option for the Walmarts of this world is “redlining” the Amazon – simply suspend meat purchases from the Amazon, and buy meat from somewhere else less risky.
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