Indigenous Leader visits US to confront the Cargill-MacMillan family

Beka Munduruku, a 21-year-old Indigenous leader from the remote Sawre Muybu village of the Brazilian Amazon traveled to the US (October 9-15) to deliver a message from her people to the family owners of Cargill, Inc., the world’s largest agribusiness company.
Read Beka's Letter

Cargill is the largest and most notable corporate presence associated with this destruction

Despite Cargill’s numerous commitments to eliminate deforestation and human rights abuses from their supply chain, they are in the process of dramatically increasing infrastructure in high-risk areas of South America. According to Beka’s letter, “while your company publicly promises to end these practices, you only expand further into our lands.”

Open Letters

Open Letter October '23

My name is Beka. I am 21 years old. I live on Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory in the Amazon forest in the state of Pará, Brazil. I have come to the United States to ask the Cargill-MacMillan family to stop the destruction of our land. My people are called the Munduruku, which means “the red ants.” We are 13,000 strong, divided into 160 communities. Life is simple here. We plant, we harvest, we create. We learn by watching our elders...

Read Letter
View Ad

Open Letter September '23

In June, we published a letter in the New York Times and Minneapolis Star Tribune asking you, the owners of Cargill, to stand with us. To change the course of your legacy and be remembered as the family that made the world better. Not worse. Since then, investigators have found more than 150 thousand acres of forest and savanna burned or cleared in the regions where Cargill operates, an area four times the size of your hometown of Minneapolis...

Read Letter
View Ad

Open Letter June '23

As a family-owned business, you must be proud of Cargill’s 150-year heritage. You grew from a modest grain warehouse in 1865 to the largest agriculture company in the world. But today, your company’s practices threaten to tarnish that proud legacy. In 2001, Cargill publicly acknowledged the problem of forced child labor in the cocoa industry and committed to eliminating it and the other “worst forms” of child labor in the production of chocolate...

Read Letter
View Ad

At the Cargill Headquarters

In June, Stand.earth kicked off a campaign calling on the Cargill-MacMillan family to take responsibility for their company’s actions and set it on a better path. They launched the campaign by delivering a report detaileing more than a hundred cases of human rights abuses and nature destruction to the family’s investment company, Waycrosse Inc. in Wayzata, MN.

Watch Video

Join us in calling on the Cargill-MacMillan family to end human rights abuses and the destruction of nature throughout Cargill’s supply chain.

We are not asking Cargill to make any more commitments. We are asking Cargill’s owners to ensure that the company fulfills the commitments it has already made.

Learn More

This campaign is endorsed by