How accurate are zero deforestation agreements?

Yesterday, I came across a recent study (Gibbs et al, 2015) on beef industries committing to zero deforestation agreements which I found would be a good topic for discussion for today’s blogpost. After last week’s post about the impacts of livestock farming on deforestation, I wanted to have a further look into the ways beef industries have tackled this environmental issue, so far.

We are all aware of ‘sustainable goods’, ‘eco-friendly’ products or companies that strive for a sustainable future. If you haven’t come across this, check out McDonald’s environmental culture here.

I have always been sceptical about these commitments because how can we be sure that they are effectively applied in the long run? And how much is really being done at the local level?

In April 2015 and in an eight point commitment, McDonald, the world’s largest fast food meat chain, agreed to stop contributing to deforestation in order to preserve environments and biodiversity that were at risk due to livestock farming and plantations (Srinivas, 2015).

However, considering McDonald is a global company with a relatively large reach, scale and number of suppliers, I believe it would be hard to determine whether their sustainable promise is applied right down at the plantations levels. Reliant on a myriad of cattle suppliers, it becomes extremely hard for McDonald to trace down all of its cattle and ensuring that it is entirely deforestation-free is almost and surely impossible. Furthermore, applying monitoring systems have proven to be inefficient due to the growing concern of ‘cattle laundering’, where cattle may be raised and fattened on deforested land but sold to legal registered ranchers before arriving at the slaughterhouse (See Figure 1).

Despite the complex nature of tackling deforestation, scholar Holly Gibbs remains rather optimistic about the situation. Her study found that public agreements made by beef suppliers could have a real impact on rancher’s behaviours thus contributing to the preservation of the Amazonian forest. Indeed, a 2009 agreement, signed by meatpacking companies JBS-Friboi, Bertin, Marfrig and Minerva to remove deforestation from their supply chain, was widely successful with the percentage of deforested land per supplier falling from 36%, in 2009, to 4% in 2013 (Gibbs et al, 2015).

After reading and reflecting on this intriguing study, I felt it has really helped me to clear my thoughts on the rather platonic image I had of beef industries ‘sustainable culture’. I believed committing to a zero-deforestation agreement was more to do with PR and image of the company than actually taking action and making a difference. However and although there is still a long way to go with cattle monitoring systems, I was proved the opposite and I believe zero-deforestation agreements are a huge step forward in protecting the Amazon forest.