The UK bans supermarket food connected to deforestation. A true commitment or just good PR?
The news outlets in the U.S. have been quick to report the new proposed legislation in the UK banning supermarkets from selling foods connected to deforestation. Headlines like this one from Food Tank, “Supermarkets No Longer Able to Sell Foods Linked to Illegal Deforestation,” are filled with hyperbole and unfulfilled arguments. Halfway down the piece, the author sheds if only the dimmest light on the reality of the situation by quoting an expert, “But Dr. Daniel de la Torre Ugarte, a professor of agricultural economics at UT-Knoxville and a member of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, says that these bans are not as effective as they might seem.”
The UK also moved to ban the import of ground meat from EU countries, however, cured meats and cheeses are still welcome in UK supermarkets. Products like Italian Bresaola, a cured beef tenderloin for which most of the meat is imported from Brazil are still allowed regardless of the fact that cattle ranching is one of the reasons for continued deforestation. In 2019, the UK imported 12,039 tons of Italian cured meats alone, not counting cured meats and cheeses from other European countries heavily reliant on soy from the Americas.
Disposable Places with Disposable people
Deforestation is a daily struggle in many regions of the Global South, including the Amazon rainforest where our eyes are currently fixated. Many studies, reports, and articles have surfaced in the past couple of years about the link between UK and EU imports of soy and animal proteins from South America and deforestation. The European Union explains that “The Union livestock sector is highly dependent on third countries’ production for its vegetable proteins,” soy is one of the most important ‘vegetable proteins’ in the mix feeding pigs and cattle whose meat or milk later become cured meats and cheeses. The journal Science found that “As much as 22 percent of soy and 60 percent of beef exported from Brazil to the European Union is linked to illegal deforestation;” and an investigation by UnEarthed showed that the UK imports soy from Latin America to feed farm animals, especially chickens.
Latin America is just one of the many biodiversity hot spots under constant threat. In Africa, indigenous communities are dispossessed of their land to open the resources to multinationals producing palm oil or sugar cane. Similarly, in SouthEast Asia entire ecosystems have been decimated to plant palm oil, a filler now found in a vast array of products from Nutella to ice creams, chocolate bars, and even cosmetics. Behind deforestation, hidden away in the rhetoric of environmentalism, are the lives of indigenous and rural communities who continue to endure a legalized version of colonialism courtesy of free-trade agreements and a push for higher GDP. Land grabbing has been normalized as “habitat conversion” a euphemism to hide the destruction of natural ecosystems and the habitat of plants, insects, mammals, and the humans that had lived in harmony with it for centuries.
The question pounding in my head is, How does the UK plan to trace and enforce a ban on products made with any of these ingredients?
Double Gain
The UK, together with other European countries, also benefits from deforestation through the sales of agro-chemicals. An article published by Public Eye exposes the double standards in the UK and EU countries which produce and export thousands of tons of some of the most dangerous pesticides — all banned in Europe — to countries in South America, Africa, and Asia, “Our investigation shows that in 2018, British authorities approved the export of more than 28,000 tonnes of a mixture based on paraquat.” Agrochemicals are widely used — and needed — to produce GMO soy, and as professor of geography at the University of Sao Paulo, Larissa Bombardi explained, “Brazil consumes 20% of the world’s pesticides, making it the biggest consumer.” Bombardi has mapped the advance of soybean cultivation in Brazil from south to north, which has now reached the so-called “Arc of Deforestation” in Amazonia, where two elements are clearly connected, one is deforestation and the other is the use of pesticides. “Soy in Brazil today exceeds the land area of Germany, and more than 90% of this soy is transgenic (GMO). Brazil exports most of its soy to the European Union and China.”
SO, is it just good PR?
Much like the soda companies’ new PR campaign promoting recycling after multiple documentaries and studies showed the damaging impact of plastic production and pollution, regardless of the fact that less than 10% of plastic ever produced has been properly recycled. But just like the plastic industry, the giant agro-food industries would be hard-pressed to reduce their environmental and social impact as it would mean increasing costs of food production that account for ecosystem services, anti-land grabbing laws, fair labor, and trade costs. Who would pay for those added costs? The consumer? The supermarkets? Big Food? The truth is, no one wants to pay for it. Big Ag and Big Food don’t want to lower market shares or shareholders' earnings; and until respect and value for the life and the rights of the people whose lives are destroyed by land grabbing and forest degradation no real change will happen.
As optimistic as I’d like to be about this, I’m afraid this is just another effort from the UK to PR its way out of bad media coverage. This ban is a feel-good initiative aimed at calming consumer concerns over supporting rampant deforestation through their shopping cart. It’s not a new tactic for European countries to use greenwashing methods, like the so-called Green deal, without a real commitment to changing their exploitative tactics. As Jonathan Franze, an American writer, said in a Food Talk, in the U.S. we have many issues with our food system, but unlike Europe, we don’t pretend.
A Story of Colonization
This is a story with many centuries in the making. Our modern food system and the capitalist model of food production were built by Europeans through land grabbing and slavery in the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We cannot change the past, but we ought to change the present for a better future, and to believe that colonization is over is to disregard the way our food system works. As defined by Emma LaRocque, Ph.D.,
“Colonization can be defined as some form of invasion, dispossession, and subjugation of a people. The invasion need not be military; it can begin — or continue — as a geographical intrusion in the form of agricultural, urban or industrial encroachments. The result of such incursion is the dispossession of vast amounts of lands from the original inhabitants. This is often legalized after the fact. The long-term result of such massive dispossession is institutionalized inequality. The colonizer/colonized relationship is by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of the colonized.”
In his book, Sweetness and Power, (page 62) Sidney W. Mintz recounted a similar situation in the 1840s when the British Empire had to deal with the backlash from consumers who refused to purchase slavery-tainted sugar. Even though slavery had been abolished in the British colonies since 1833, mercantilists and large holding companies had continued to move sugar [among other products] produced through slavery from other regions in the Americas, all the while pointing the finger with an air of superiority. Mintz quotes a debate:
“We say to these Brazilians we can supply you with cotton goods…will you buy them? By all means, say the Brazilians, and we will pay you with our sugar and coffee. No, say we, your sugar and coffee are produced by slave labor; we are men of principle and our conscious will not allow us to consume the product of slave labor…We are men of principle, but we are also men of business, and we try to help the Brazilians…We have plenty of ships and they are at your service…We will not only carry your sugar but we will refine it for you too…We tell you at once, that, if the price of our own sugar should rise above a certain value, we will buy more of your slave-grown sugar and we will eat it ourselves.”
~ Paula
