Cargill-MacMillan family, Last year, Cargill promised to end the destruction of nature in their South American supply chains by 2025. Unfortunately, your company’s previous promises have gone up in flames. This time, make sure your company keeps its word. Leave a legacy of leadership, not broken promises.
Your company has made a laudable New Year’s resolution: to eliminate the destruction of not only forests like the Amazon, but other critical ecosystems including the Cerrado, Pampa, and Pantanal in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay by 2025. If implemented, this policy would be a dramatic step towards making Cargill a leader in conservation rather than a leader in destruction. However, we ask you to understand that, given our experience with Cargill making and breaking promises, it’s hard not to be cautious with our optimism.
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. This is how we learn the riches of our culture: our stories, our forests, our animals.
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.
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.
On November 27, 2023, Cargill announced a commitment to eliminate deforestation and land conversion in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay by 2025.This commitment by Cargill is potentially a huge and long-awaited step forward for the planet and the Indigenous communities who depend on these ecosystems. Unfortunately, given Cargill’s long track record of breaking previous commitments – it is hard not to be skeptical.
