By Michael Taylor
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A new push by global household brands to combat tropical forest loss must do better at reducing deforestation across whole supply chains if it is to succeed where earlier efforts failed, environmentalists warned.
High-profile members of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) this week launched the “Forest Positive Coalition of Action”, vowing to speed up work to stop key commodity supply chains causing further loss of forests, in a bid to curb climate change.
But the launch was met with scepticism by many green groups after the Paris-based CGF struggled to meet a 2020 target set a decade ago to purchase only sustainably produced commodities, including palm oil, soy, beef, paper and pulp.
“We’ve seen ten years of inaction, half-measures and greenwashing from the CGF, while human rights defenders and frontline communities have been putting their lives on the line to defend forests,” said Brihannala Morgan, a senior campaigner at U.S.-based environmental group Rainforest Action Network.
“We have an increasingly narrow window of time to take real action,” she added in a statement.
In 2019, tropical rainforests – whose preservation is considered crucial to limiting planetary heating – disappeared at a rate of one football pitch every six seconds, according to data from online monitoring service Global Forest Watch.
Green groups blame the production of palm oil, the world’s most widely used edible oil, and other agricultural commodities for much of the destruction, as forests are cleared for plantations, ranches and farms.
The 17 consumer brands, retailers and manufacturers making up the new forest coalition – which have a collective market value of $1.8 trillion – include Carrefour, Walmart, General Mills, Mars, Nestle, Unilever and PepsiCo.
Led by their chief executive officers, the group will aim to fast-track efforts to remove deforestation from supply chains, and create best-practice plans for each commodity.
Environmentalists say conserving existing forests and restoring damaged ones reduces the risk of flooding, reins in global warming by storing more carbon and protects biodiversity.
“The executives of these CGF companies live on the same planet as the rest of us, and we all face the same climate emergency,” said Morgan.
Jeff Conant, forests programme director at Friends of the Earth US, said agribusiness and consumer brands had been making “empty promises for a decade while continuing to profit from the destruction”, as wildfires and storms batter a warming world.
“Unless we see real action, we can expect that whatever the CGF says about being ‘forest positive’ is pure, utter greenwash,” he added.
