Tropical deforestation is worsening so the UK must do far more to stop it
NGO report argues agriculture is biggest driver of forest loss and an increasing amount of it is illegal
There are any number of obvious reasons why the latest version of the UK’s much-needed, long-heralded, potentially world-leading Environment Bill needs to be dramatically improved. But if any MPs, members of the House of Lords, Prime Minister Boris Johnson or his ministers still need some further motivation to amend one particular section squeezed in towards the end, then he or she should read an alarming report which, despite being published last month and part-funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has been entirely ignored by the British media.
“Illicit Harvest, Complicit Goods: The State of Illegal Deforestation for Agriculture” was written by US-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) Forest Trends. After acknowledging that it has been known for some years that commercial agriculture is “by far the single largest driver of deforestation worldwide and thus also of greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change”, the basic conclusion is that “clearing for commercial agriculture has continued and is, in fact, getting worse. . . More forest land is being illegally cleared to make way for agricultural crops and pastures than ever before.”
The figures are startling. Between 2013 and 2019 Forest Trends claims that 60% of tropical deforestation was due to commercial agriculture, that 69% of it was illegal, and that therefore the amount of illegal deforestation, when compared to that between 2000 and 2012, has increased by some 28%. That means “the equivalent of clearing more than five Manhattans every day for seven years” up to 2019. The main offending commodities are soy, palm oil and cattle products, according to the report, but others such as cocoa, rubber, coffee and maize are significant too.
Of course, deforestation doesn’t just involve cutting down trees. It also releases huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, destroys biodiversity and wildlife habitat, and increasingly threatens the more than 1.5 billion people worldwide who live in and/or rely on forests for their homes, livelihoods and survival. “Access to forest land for clearance is also driving global increases in violence against indigenous peoples, local communities, and environmental defenders, as well as migration when communities are displaced,” Forest Trends asserts.
“The report is shocking, and perhaps what shocks me most is that these are conservative estimates, and that the rate of illegal loss continues to increase,” Forest Trends’s Kerstin Canby tells me. “Much research has already gone into assessing overall deforestation and deforestation caused by agro-conversion [but] very little has been written on illegal deforestation.”
Other experts emphasise the significance of their conclusions, with Sam Lawson, director of the UK-based NGO Earthsight, arguing we are now at a “pivotal” moment globally. “The news is not good,” he wrote in a commentary on the report for US media site Mongabay. “Far from tackling this huge problem, we have allowed it to get worse.”
“Someone with my background is aware that the problem is bad, but what is most alarming is that it’s getting worse, not better, and the time we’ve got left to sort it out is getting shorter,” Lawson tells me. “The climate crisis is becoming more and more pressing. There’s too much talk internationally about planting trees when we’re still cutting them down in their millions.”
For Chiara Vitali, from the NGO Fern, with offices in Belgium, France and the UK, Forest Trends’s report confirms her understanding of the issue. “I can’t say I’m shocked because I’m a professional on this and I’m submerged with bad news, but they’re drawing attention to agriculture as the main driver of deforestation, absolutely, and that it’s a problem that’s continuing to escalate,” she says. “All policy-makers should be taking note of this report.”
But what does any of this have to do with the UK and its Environment Bill? Plenty, partly because the UK imports so many commodities - or products derived from such commodities - from countries where forests are razed to produce them, partly because UK banks reportedly play a fundamental role in financing such devastation, and partly because the Bill, discussed in the House of Lords last week, now includes a section on “forest risk commodities” that is apparently intended to reduce the UK’s global deforestation footprint.
“As one of the world’s major economies, we’re one of the biggest consumers of commodities driving deforestation far away in other parts of the world,” says Lawson. “People sometimes think about what they’re buying when they buy a wood product, but when they buy a bar of soap, ice-cream or chicken it doesn’t occur to them that it could be linked to deforestation in Brazil or Indonesia. So if we care about the world’s forests - and most British people would say that they do - those same people would be shocked to learn how complicit they have been made to be by the failures of corporations and government.”
Lawson cites beef, soy and palm oil as the most significant forest risk commodities coming into the UK. “They’re the same ones for everywhere really,” he says. “Palm oil is destroying Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s forests, beef and soy are destroying Latin America’s forests, and we’re big importers of all three. It’s one of the things that makes Britain unique. There are other parts of the world which are big importers of one but not the others, but because we don’t have our own domestic production on the scale that, say, the US does for soy, we import everything.”
Fern’s Vitali echoes Lawson. “As the world becomes more and more globalised, supply-chains become increasingly extended,” she tells me. “A good example is our meat consumption, which involves soy derivatives coming from Latin America. You can also talk about palm oil. You can talk about cocoa. Our supply-chains extend all around the world and deforestation finds its way into them. That’s why it’s so important to have this legislation.”
However, as experts like Lawson, Vitali and many others are fervently arguing, the Bill currently doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Although it obliges commercial operators to trade or use forest risk commodities - or products derived from such commodities - by complying with “relevant local laws”, as well as implementing a “due diligence system” in order to attempt to ensure that that happens, the details remain extremely weak and vague. Not only that, but the Bill ignores the financing of forest risk commodities as well as any obligation to respect the rights of indigenous peoples’ and other local communities, and focuses on illegal deforestation only, rather than all deforestation, which runs the risk of rendering the law largely or entirely meaningless in practice, as well as offering potentially perverse incentives to cut down ever more forest and constituting a lowering of the standards of previous UK and some corporate commitments. The Bill is due to be discussed in committee in the House of Lords from this coming Monday: Lords and Baronesses must fight for the necessary amendments to be made and accepted.