Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Or not. Adam, the ingrate, says that I can't say any of that stuff: it's
not true.
This is the
problem with having colleagues with integrity. They're always bringing it to work.
Soy, he tells me, whether or not I want to hear it, has never been a dominant cause of
deforestation in the Amazon, has never been responsible for more than a tenth of the de-
struction. A measly tenth! The soy frenzy in Pará had generated a lot of heat in the media
and among environmentalists. But when you look at the Amazon as a whole, soy has nev-
er come close to matching the deforestation caused by cattle ranching. In fact, even slash-
and-burn farmers like Nestor still account for more deforestation than soy ever did. Which
means that maybe I should have cast Nestor as a villain (even though he was friendly and
sold us cheap beer) and been more sympathetic to Luiz, even though he had stumbled
around shouting like a drunken jerk.
Why, then, all the ruckus about soy? The answer, perhaps, is that soy burst onto the
scene with such frightening speed—and also that, in Cargill, environmentalists had found
a concrete target.
In 2006 Greenpeace released a report called
Eating Up the Amazon,
which gave Cargill
a lot of attention. The report traced soy grown on deforested land through the Cargill ter-
minal and all the way to Europe, where it ended up as animal feed for chicken and beef
sold in McDonald's restaurants. This crystallized the problem in a powerful way. After
all, an activist who can cry “
J'accuse!
” toward a specific McNugget is an activist who
has nicely focused the case. Furthermore, the McNugget connection provided two strategic
choke points for Greenpeace to attack: the Santarém terminal and the McDonald's board-
room.
To the terminal, they sent their ship the
Arctic Sunrise,
which blocked the dock and de-
livered a team of activists who climbed up onto the works, as they do, briefly shutting it
down.
To McDonald's, they sent the heavy artillery: people in chicken suits. In Britain, Green-
peace shock troops dressed as poultry danced through McDonald's franchises and chained
themselves to restaurant tables. The news footage of this is pure Dadaist entertainment,
with a police officer approaching one of the chickens to ask who's in charge.
Activists should break out the chicken suits more often. Within weeks, the pressure had
worked its way backward along the supply chain. Cargill came to the negotiating table,
along with all the other major buyers of Brazilian soy (including companies such as ADM).
The companies were clearly terrified that they were next in line for their own visit from the
chicken suits.
Not three months after it all started, the soy buyers signed an agreement under which
they would buy no soy from recently deforested land. According to David Cleary, a strategy
