Cargill

From action.RAN.org

Cargill—whose 2008 revenues totaled $120.4 billion [1] — is the second largest privately owned company in the world [2] . It also conducts most of its sales to other food companies, but its consumer brands include Diamond Crystal salt, Gerkens cocoa, Honeysuckle White poultry and Sterling Silver meats [3] . Cargill is a member of the RSPO and RTRS.

The Palm Oil Industry

Cargill owns 5 oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (PNG), and is the largest exporter of palm oil to the USA. Cargill is also the largest US importer of palm oil, sourcing the oil from at least 26 producers and buying roughly 11% of Indonesia’s total oil palm output. [4]

Cargill’s dirty and destructive practices in the oil palm industry threaten tropical rainforests and traditional communities: • All 83,000 hectares of Cargill’s five directly owned oil palm plantations have been carved out of lowland rainforests, causing massive deforestation. As of 2009, Cargill is actively clearing forest in Borneo at their PT Harapan Sawit Lestari plantation without an environmental impact assessment, which is required by Indonesian law. [5]

• Cargill purchases palm oil from many more ‘worst-of-the-worst” rainforest destroyers - including Wilmar, Sinar Mas, and Duta Palma - all of whom violate Indonesian law by burning rainforests. [6]

• Local communities have lost their ancestral forests and farmland to Cargill’s oil palm plantations. These communities were not properly compensated for their lands, nor did they give their free, prior, and informed consent for the conversion of their lands to industrial monoculture. Hundreds of cases of social conflict have been documented at Cargill’s oil palm plantations by NGOs, government, and Indonesia’s National Human Rights Court. [7][8]

• At Cargill’s three oil palm plantations in PNG, formally independent farmers are being converted into de facto bonded laborers through Cargill’s use of complex debt schemes and unfulfilled promises of new roads, schools, and hospitals. Covering rugged and isolated terrain, Cargill’s own management has acknowledged their inability to prevent the use of child labor on their PNG plantations. [9]

In destroying forests and harming forest peoples, Cargill regularly violates its own corporate social responsibility policies and industry commitments to produce palm oil sustainably.

The Soy Industry

The company is aggressively pursuing soy grown on illegally cleared Amazon rainforest land. Ranking second to Bunge in soy crushing capacity in Brazil [10] —with three soy-only refineries and two other refineries that process soy [11]—Cargill opened a soy port in 2003 in the heart of the Amazon to facilitate transport of the commodity from previously inaccessible forests. The effects were immediate and undeniable: Deforestation in the area doubled [12] . (The devastating effects of this port on deforestation in the Amazon were documented in Greenpeace’s 2006 report, “Eating Up the Amazon.”) The Brazilian government determined that Cargill had not provided adequate reporting of the port’s potential environmental impacts and closed it down, but Cargill continues to operate the port illegally. Cargill owns two additional soy ports in Brazil which are likely exporting soy grown in the Amazon. Cargill is now pursuing plans to build an even larger soy port and processing facility near Asunción, Paraguay, despite widespread opposition. [13]

References:

[1] Cargill, 2008 Summary Annual Report

[2] Food and Water Watch, “Cargill: A Corporate Threat to Food and Farming,” 2008, p. iv.

[3] Ibid, Food and Water Watch

[4] Jan Willem van Gelder, Greasy Palms: European Buyers of Indonesian Palm Oil, Friends of the Earth, 2004.

[5]Personal comment made to David Gilbert by Cargill’s Procedure Assurement Officer at PT Harapan Sawit Lestari, Indonesia. July, 2009.

[6] Arie Rukmantara, “Government to sue firms over forest fires,” Jakarta Post, Sept 2, 2006

[7] Leslie Potter. Dayak resistance to oil palm plantations in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Paper presented to the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in Melbourne 1-3 July 2008.

[8] Erik Wakker. The Kalimantan Border Oil Palm Mega-Project. AIDEnvironement. April, 2006.

[9] RSPO PNG National Interpretation Working Group. Pt. Moresby. November 7 2007.

[10] Borealis COC research, p. 39.

[11] Borealis COC research, p. 39.

[12] “The 7,000 km journey that links Amazon destruction to fast food: Farmers illegally seize virgin land for soya crops,” John Vidal, Thursday April 6, 2006, The Guardian