Can a fast food company save the Amazon?

Tackling the environmental challenges we face today is everybody’s business. And sometimes this becomes, very literally, a business proposition.

Nobody knows this better than McDonald’s who, after coming under attack by Greenpeace for contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon, decided to bite the bullet and work with Greenpeace to find solutions that would protect the Amazon as well as meet the need of global business.

The tale of how Greenpeace and McDonalds came together reflects the complexities of a globalised economy. It also illustrates how once-unthinkable partnerships can become forces for good, addressing environmental and social problems that governments alone cannot solve.

Why the campaign?

The Amazon is the largest remaining tropical forest in the world. It is as large as Western Europe and extends over some 6.5 million square kilometres. It is thought to be the most diverse ecosystem on Earth. It is home to nearly 10 per cent of the world's mammals and a staggering 15 per cent of the world's known land-based plant species, with as many as 300 species of tree in a single hectare.

The Amazon basin is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet and about one fifth of all running water flows through the Amazon. Importantly the Amazon plays a vital role in keeping the world's climate stable.

Although the largest part of the Amazon is contained within Brazil, the forest stretches over eight more countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guyana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam and Venezuela.

In Brazil alone the Amazon is home to more than 20 million people, including an estimated 220,000 people from 180 different indigenous nations. These people rely on the forest for their way of life. It provides almost everything from food and shelter to tools and medicines as well as playing a crucial role in people's spiritual and cultural life.

All this is threatened by a demand for cheap supplies of timber and, increasingly, by the large scale growing of cash crops such as soya. Between 60 and 80 per cent of all logging in the Brazilian Amazon is thought to be illegal, and more than one million hectares within the Amazon rainforests are already being used to grow soya, again much of this illegally.

A fifth of the Amazon rainforest has already been destroyed. Since the 1970s, an area twice the size of New Zealand has been lost. During a 12-month period in the early 2000’s the equivalent of 12 soccer pitches per minute disappeared. A significant part of what remains is under direct threat - as are the forest plants, animals and people who depend upon the forest.

The analysis that shaped this particular campaign was that while the ability of the Brazilian government to halt rampant deforestation in remote areas of the Amazon was very limited, the corporate sector could play a role in the protection of the forest.

While commodity traders such as Cargill and Bunge are anonymous to the average person their customers are often household names, making them sensitive to consumer pressure as they cannot afford to be seen to be complicit in the destruction of the environment. This sensitivity was leveraged by Greenpeace in this campaign.

McDonald’s role in the Amazon

In April 2006, Greenpeace published Eating up the Amazon, an investigation into the links between soya in the supply chains of leading international companies and the destruction of the Amazon forest.

The report revealed that large amounts of soya were shipped to Europe mainly for use in animal feed. The research traced soya from illegal plantations in the Amazon right through the supply chain to food being sold in restaurants and supermarkets. One relatively small-scale but high-profile buyer was McDonald's European operation, which fed the soya to chickens destined to become McNuggets.

While McDonald’s considered the findings of the report Greenpeace staged protests at McDonald's outlets in Europe, and sent its ship, the Arctic Sunrise, to block Cargill's port in the Amazon city of Santarem.

It did not take long for McDonald’s senior management to decide that the company, instead of disputing the evidence, needed to address the problem they had. And this is how the well-known fast-food company with the golden arches, and the global environmentalists came together to pressure the biggest soya traders in Brazil into placing an unprecedented two-year moratorium on the purchase of any soya from newly deforested areas.

McDonald’s bought the soya that fed their chicken from Cargill, one of the world’s largest commodity traders.

Initially Cargill argued that it was bringing economic development to an impoverished region and was already promoting good stewardship practices. Greenpeace, and soon additional environmental groups, replied that the company was inducing farmers to move into environmentally fragile areas, where they often began planting without proper permits and with little understanding of forest conservation.

To increase the pressure on Cargill McDonald’s brought together a coalition of high profile customers in support of their agenda. Faced with its unhappy clients, Cargill brought together other Brazilian soya traders, and they ultimately agreed on the moratorium - an unthinkable response just a few months earlier.

Once the moratorium was in place a working group comprising soya traders, environmental and community organisations and representatives of the Brazilian government was created to agree on what the long term solution to protecting the Amazon would look like.

As the soya moratorium approached its second anniversary and scheduled expiry date in July 2008, the Brazilian soya traders agreed to extend the initiative until July 2009. As the third anniversary of the moratorium now approaches, it is expected that the working group agrees on what mechanisms are required to prevent the loss of the Amazon to uncontrolled agriculture expansion.

Future challenges

The soya moratorium has changed the way producers and traders think about the rainforest. The sector has acknowledged responsibility for its role in deforestation and (in some cases) accepted that it must act.

The urgent need to halt destruction of the Amazon is now firmly on the corporate and political agenda and the moratorium has strengthened the Brazilian Government’s strategies to fight deforestation. Inspired by the success of the moratorium so far, the Brazilian Government is developing similar approaches with the timber and beef industries to bring long-term protection to the Amazon rainforest and combat climate change effectively.

Corporations need to take their commitment to sustainability seriously and do what McDonald’s did - face the facts and take action. Often a company’s response comes down to that of committed individuals, and while it is fantastic that those individuals exist corporations need to ensure that its response goes beyond individual’s commitment and becomes a fundamental part of the company culture. Making a profit cannot be allowed to cost the earth.

Beyond the moratorium, international political will and establishing international finance to keep forests standing is critical. “Forest countries” such as Brazil need to be financially compensated for protecting their forests. This is of critical importance if we are to control climate change and, of course, to protect biodiversity.

Last year Greenpeace and eight other NGOs in Brazil launched a zero-deforestation proposal, aimed at ending deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon by 2015. They proposed the establishment of a fund, to speed up Brazil’s initiatives to fight deforestation and promote sustainable forest use. Taking up the NGOs’ proposal, on August 1, 2008 the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree creating a new Amazon Fund, intended to raise US$1 billion in its first year. The fund’s first donation, US$100 million, came from Norway.

This initiative now needs to be replicated on a global level, so that the forests of Indonesia, the Congo Basin and elsewhere, can be protected too.

For McDonald's working with a group like Greenpeace was unusual but not unprecedented. The company has joined with a variety of environmental and animal welfare groups over the years on issues including the company's packaging, the use of environmentally harmful refrigerants and treatment of farm animals. Creating a responsible supply chain is part of the corporate culture, its officials say, though it clearly is also good public relations.

Joint efforts between nonprofit groups and major corporations have become increasingly important and sophisticated and this could be an important model for attacking very complicated social and environmental problems in the future.

Corporations now need to take the next step in their effort to ensure that making a profit does not cost the earth by exerting their influence to change public policy. In Brazil the pressure exerted by McDonalds and the coalition of soya customers enabled the Brazilian government to put forward the zero-deforestation proposal. This would not have happened unless corporations had argued that they could not continue to buy soya from Brazil if this meant the demise of the Amazon. More corporations need to embrace the challenge of running business in a sustainable manner and shed the old habit of remaining quiet, or worse, to work openly or behind the scenes to weaken legislation, question science and put profit ahead of the survival of the planet.