From action.RAN.org

Frames: Most of our food is controlled by a handful of corporations while small famers around the world confront hunger, displacement and the environmental impacts of big ag: poisoning, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation

• Cargill is the biggest:
  • $120 billion in annual revenues
  • Bigger than the economies of more than 2/3 of the world’s countries
  • Sales are bigger than Disney, Kraft, and Pepsi combined
  • Twice as big as next closest competitor – ADM
  • Leads in almost every phase of the food production system – so can impact agriculture all over the world, set prices.
  • Last year in April, at the same time the World Bank declared that 100 million people would fall into extreme hunger and poverty from higher food prices, Cargill record profits – because of higher food prices.
• Cargill owns 14,000 acres of plantations on PNG and Indonesia
• 1 in 10 products in us grocery stores contain palm oil
• Want to produce 43 million metric tons of palm oil, 80% coming from South East Asia

Examples:

Papua New Guinea:

• Cargill owns 3 massive plantations and a processing plant form a checkerboard through the rainforest the size of California – continuing to expand
  • Building 2 new football field size mills
• Cargill owns Ambogo Palm Oil Estates – where they illegally hold the toxic sludge from processing in unlined containers. Its leaking into rivers and during heavy rains overflows into rivers causing illnesses and skin problems
• Debt Peonage: communities are pressured into “mini estates” with Cargill – Cargill
  • Charges communities for all fertilizers, labor and transport
  • Takes 90% of the profit
  • Communities must grow and harvest palm oil until their debt is paid off.
• In Oro Province, Cargill is the only buyer – purchases from 5,700 oil palm farmers gives 57% of the selling price – encouraging expansion
• Gender discrimination: People are paid by weight- woman pick up off ground, men pick the bunches.
• Paraquat: outlawed in the US – Cargill uses in PNG – never provides protective gear
• Orangutans!

Indonesia:

• Land titles: Most land is not legally titled, and thus owned by government
  • Getting titles too expensive
  • Palm oil companies will arrive with bulldozers
  • When people complain to the government they are shown that Cargill or ADM now owns their family’s traditional lands.
• Debt Peonage: Small farmers borrow money to pay for fertilizer and seedlings from the palm oil company- repay with palm oil with prices set by the company.
• Child labor
• Displacement: The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Sixth session, New York was recently held in New York (14-25 May 2007). Forum chair Victoria Tauli-Corpuz said that “Indigenous people are being pushed off their lands to make way for an expansion of biofuel crops around the world, threatening to destroy their cultures by forcing them into big cities”. She highlighted that some of the native people most at risk live in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together produce 80 percent of the world's palm oil - one of the crops used to make biofuels. Although she said there are few statistics showing how many people are at risk of losing their lands, in one Indonesian province - West Kalimantan - the U.N. has identified 5 million indigenous people who will likely be displaced because of biofuel crop expansion.
• Peat destruction is a time-bomb that, unless stopped, will cause catastrophic climate change Millions of hectares of South-east Asia’s peatlands are being drained for oil palm plantations. Those peatlands are one of the world’s most important carbon sinks – they store 40-50 billion tonnes of carbon, which is the equivalent of about six years of global fossil fuel emissions. A recent study by Wetlands International, Delft Hydraulics and Alterra suggests that the destruction of those peatlands is responsible for at least 8% of all global carbon dioxide emissions – and this figure does not include the large-scale emissions linked to deforestation for palm oil.
• Orangutans!

Brasil:

• Xavante territories are islands surrounded by soy, bought or owned by Cargill – suffering from chemical spray, contaminated rivers, changing ecosystems – causing a shift in diets – causing a shift in traditions and new rates of suicide. Internal conflicts between families that plant soy and everyone else.
• Lucas do Rio Verde, Mato Grosso also an island, gets aerially sprayed with herbicides – causes diarrhea, vomiting, skin rashes – killed everyone’s gardens, all plant life.
• Santerem Cargill owns a port that has been ruled illegal but still operates
  • Caused regional deforestation to double since it opened in 2003

Paraguay:

• Spraying – causing death
• Violent Displacement:
  • 100,000 small farmers evicted since the beginning of soy boom.
  • Relocated many Indigenous communities as well.
  • Evictions happen between 2-3 am without notice
  • 118 land occupations – 18 military bases formed in response
  • 600 people arrested 93 killed since 1990
  • June 24th 2005 – hired police and soy producers kicked 270 people off their land, burned down 54 homes, arrested 130 people, killed 2.
• Constructing a soy processing plant in Asuncion, Paraguay only 500 meters upstream from the public water utility – people concerned with contamination

Factoids about the company/ opps for action: “Committed to Nourishing Ideas and Nourishing People” Minnesota Public Radio

1. Letter delivery to Patricia Woertz - we have hundreds from kids from around the world [DE: and THOUSANDS of petition signatures!]
2. Having little one-on-one chats with employees where they eat lunch, take breaks, etc. at ADM/Cargill headquarters and Chicago Board of Trade
3. Flower deliveries to Cargill and ADM headquarters - starting mysteriously then including nice notes, then requesting they stop tarnishing their good name by doing business with dirty companies in Indonesia.
4. Stickering up MN and IL
5. Posters from kids letters all around MN and IL
6. Guerilla art around MN and IL
7. Anti–Cargill gardens in public place [What is an anti-Cargill garden?]
8. Stands at Farmer’s markets
9. Bird-dogging as they travel to conferences, or make any public appearance.
10. School presentations at the private schools Cargil and ADM employees send their kids to.
11. NVDA at headquarters
12. Stopping palm oil at the docks from getting delivered to their processing plants
13. Shut down their processing plants