UK chicken linked to Brazilian deforestation - 7th December 2020

Chicken found on supermarket shelves and sold in fast-food outlets and reared on soya beans has been linked to thousands of forest fires and at least 800 square kilometres of tree clearance in the Brazilian Cerrado, a joint cross border investigation has revealed.

The Cerrado is a 2 million square kilometre tropical savannah stretching diagonally across central Brazil and accounting for over a fifth of the country, as well as parts of Bolivia and Paraguay. A haven of biodiversity, it's home to a wide variety of flora and fauna. Among them are 11,620 plant species, 1,200 species of fish, and 200 mammal species, such as jaguars, anteaters and tapirs. The region is also one of the world's most unappreciated and minimally protected carbon sinks, absorbing and storing a significant quantity of carbon each year.

However, more than half of the Cerrado has already been destroyed to make way for the cultivation of one of the country's top exports: soya.

In recent years, regulations around deforestation have been loosened by the Brazilian government. It has turned the tables on environmental controls, even encouraging the sacrifice of the Cerrado's ecology of grassland scrub and dry forest in order to boost exports to markets such as China and Europe.

A billion chickens are consumed each year in the UK, which equates to 15 birds per UK resident. Many are reared on soya beans imported from the Cerrado.

While sustainable chicken feed is theoretically possible, shoppers are unwittingly exacerbating deforestation in vast numbers due to an opaque supply chain and inadequate labelling systems.