MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th May, 2021) Three of the world's biggest food producers have been accused of buying soybeans from companies that sourced them from a farmer sanctioned for destroying the Amazon rainforest.
Greenpeace, Reporter Brasil and the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism said they cross-referenced satellite images and official records to prove that farmer Alexandra Perinoto was growing soy on illegally deforested land.
The beans were bought by the global soy traders Fiagril and Alianca Agricola who supplied them to US' Bunge and Cargill and China's Cofco. All five companies are signatories to the Amazon Soy Moratorium, a non-binding deal that aims to block "dirty" soy from entering the global supply.
Environmentalists said they found a loophole in the agreement, which allows farmers to "launder" deforestation-linked soy by moving it from a farm built on embargoed land to a clean one.
There is no way of telling where soybeans come from. Traders that decide to buy from farmers who own both clean and dirty plots judge how much they can buy by calculating the clean farms' productivity.
However, commercial guidelines prevent traders from talking to others about how much soy they are buying from a farmer. This allows dishonest farmers to sell their virtual clean crop multiple times.
The Perinoto family, who has been growing soy in Brazil's largest soy-producing state of Mato Grosso, is behind last year's fires in the Amazon. An international uproar forced President Jair Bolsonaro to impose a four-month ban on setting fires to clear land.
