A year ago today Cargill, one of the most powerful players in the global food industry, announced that the soy, corn, wheat and cotton that it commercialises from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay will be all free of deforestation and land conversion by 2025. In other words, none of those four commodities from those three countries, it was claimed, will have been grown as a result of cutting down or converting forests - although no “cut-off” date was specified.
That November 2023 commitment followed one made the previous year by Cargill, along with 13 other companies, to eliminate by 2025 deforestation for soy grown in the Amazon, Gran Chaco and Brazilian Cerrado in particular. That pledge was made in the much-maligned “Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5°C” released at the United Nations’ climate change conference in 2022, which the US-based NGO Mighty Earth subsequently accused Cargill of sabotaging.
But Bolivia - and therefore the vast majority of the magnificent Chiquitano forest - is not included in either of those 2025 targets. This is despite the fact that it is one of the world’s top 10 soy producers, although nothing on the scale of Argentina and Brazil, and Cargill is among the very biggest exporters of Bolivian soy. It is also despite the fact that for the last four years running more tropical primary forest has been cut down in Bolivia than any other country in the world except Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Chiquitano, where Cargill has silos, has been particularly badly affected.
Moreover, as the UK-based NGO Global Witness exposed in a report in September 2023, to which I contributed as a consultant, Cargill has been buying soy from properties in the Chiquitano where 1,000s of hectares of forest have been knocked down in recent years. In addition, that report also leaked a Cargill map apparently showing a number of areas across the Chiquitano and elsewhere in eastern Bolivia from which the company is or was open to buying even more soy - something that would require an estimated three million more hectares of forest being cut down.
Cargill’s response to Global Witness’s allegations was instructive. Among other things, the company pointed out that the Chiquitano is not one of its “priority biomes” - i.e. the Amazon, Gran Chaco and Brazilian Cerrado - and therefore doesn’t fall within Cargill’s 2025 soy target, but that it is included within the company’s broader commitment to remove “deforestation and conversion” from its soy supply chains across all of South America by 2030.
But that means another five years of potentially soy-related deforestation. It’s almost as if Cargill is saying: “It’s only Bolivia, so who cares?”
Yet obviously Cargill, like any other company trading Bolivian soy, should care - and this year more than any other. 2024 has been an annus horribilis for Bolivia where, as of September 30, an astonishing 5.8 million hectares of forests had been impacted by fires - most of which are generally understood to be connected to the expansion of the agricultural frontier.
“2024 will stay in the memory of Bolivians as the year of the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history,” the NGO TIERRA stated when it released those figures.
Cargill did not reply to my request for comment.