Cargill keeps silent over leaked soy plans for eastern Bolivia
US company map suggests millions of hectares of forest would have to be cut down
Last September the NGO Global Witness (GW) revealed that it had obtained a map apparently belonging to Cargill, the biggest private company in the US and one of the most powerful players in global agriculture. GW published its own rendition of that map, said to date from 2018, in a report titled “Empty promises: Cargill, soy, banks and the destruction of Bolivia’s Chiquitano forest”, to which I contributed as a consultant. What the map purportedly shows are a series of areas - 11 in the original version, 10 in GW’s - across eastern Bolivia from which Cargill is or was open to buying soy beans.
The reason that map is so alarming - and therefore worth making public - is the extent to which the areas marked on it overlap with standing forest. In other words, for those areas to produce soy, that forest would have to be cut down. According to GW’s estimates, that would amount to roughly three million hectares in total.
This is despite the fact that Cargill has been making public commitments about eliminating deforestation from its supply-chains for many years. For example, a decade ago the company had committed to becoming “deforestation-free” by 2020 - a target it ultimately abandoned in 2019.
The map is particularly worth highlighting now because of recently-published analysis by the NGO World Resources Institute (WRI) and University of Maryland (UoM) researchers in the US showing that in 2023 Bolivia lost more tropical forest than any other country in the world except Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “despite having less than half the forest area of either the Congo or Indonesia.”
That puts Bolivia in third place globally for the fourth year running. Indeed, according to WRI and UoM, 2023 was Bolivia’s worst year ever - with a 27% increase on 2022.
When GW, before publishing “Empty Promises”, gave Cargill the opportunity to comment on the map, as well as various other allegations, the US company, in an emailed response, conspicuously ignored it. No comment. Among other things, the company stated “Cargill is firmly committed to ending deforestation in our global agricultural supply-chains and ending deforestation and conversion in our soy supply chain in South America by 2030.”
Cargill also stated that, regarding the other allegations made by GW, “the mentioned communities are located in the ecoregion of “Chiquitano dry forest”, and Tropical & Subtropical Dry Broadleaf Forest Biome, which is not part of the sector roadmap priority biomes, that cover Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco” - a reference to the much-publicised, much-maligned “Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5°C” which was released at the United Nations’ “COP27” climate change conference in 2022 and commits Cargill and 13 other companies to eliminating deforestation for soy production in the Amazon, the Chaco and the Brazilian Cerrado by 2025.
It’s almost as if they’re saying: “It’s only the Chiquitano getting devastated, so who cares?”
More than six months later, Cargill is continuing to keep its silence over the map. The company did not respond to my questions about it.