"Revealed: UK supermarket and fast food chicken linked to deforestation in Brazil", 25th November 2020

...Tesco, Lidl, Asda, McDonald’s, Nando’s and other high street retailers all source chicken fed on soya supplied by trading behemoth Cargill, the US’s second largest private company. The combination of minimal protection for the Cerrado – a globally important carbon sink and wildlife habitat – with an opaque supply chain and confusing labelling systems, means that shoppers may be inadvertently contributing to its destruction.

The broadcaster and campaigner Chris Packham said the revelations showed that consumers needed to be given more information about their food. “Most people would be incredulous when they think they’re buying a piece of chicken in Tesco’s which has been fed on a crop responsible for one of the largest wholesale tropical forest destructions in recent times,” he said...

The UK slaughters at least a billion chickens a year, equivalent to 15 birds for every person in the country. Many are fattened up on soya beans imported into the UK by Cargill, which buys from farmers in the Cerrado, a woody tropical savanna that covers an area equal in size to Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.

Analysis of shipping data shows that Cargill imported 1.5m tonnes of Brazilian soya to the UK in the six years to August 2020. Biome-level export figures, collated by the supply-chain watchdog Trase, indicate that nearly half of Cargill’s Brazilian exports to the UK are from the Cerrado...

[See Cargill's recent response to their role in the deforestation of the Amazon here]