Brazil: ADM’s exploitation of land & workers gets new coat of green paint
Archer Daniels Midland Co. said it has joined with Brazilian nonprofit
environmental group Alianca Da Terra to launch a program aimed at
encouraging Brazilian soy-bean farmers to adopt sustainable practices.
The program,Produzindo Certo, or “doing it right,” seeks to help
farmers maximize the yield potential of their farmland to minimize the
environmentally damaging conversion of Brazilian wildland in farm
acreage, the U.S. grain-processing and ethanol producer said.
“By
providing farmers with the training they need to increase their yields
in sustainable, environmentally responsible ways, we can help minimize
further expansion into environmentally sensitive areas,” said Domingo
Lastra, president of the parent’s ADM South America group. As the
world’s appetite for protein and grains expands, Brazilian growers
have aggressively expanded production by stripping the nation’s
forests and savannas and turning them into farmland. The situation is
an ecological disaster in the making, many critics say, complicated by
the fact that high demand means the typically low-income owners of the
Brazilian frontier land can sell stripped acreage for five or six
times the price of undeveloped land.
The issue is a sensitive one for
U.S. companies that buy or process grain grown on such lands, and at
ADM’s November shareholder meeting, representatives of a group known
as the Rainforest Action Network called on ADM to help fight
destruction of the rainforest.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-adm-soybeans-brazil-jan14,0,6571170.story
— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com