Ending Deforestation

Forests are crucial to life on the planet. They support four-fifths of terrestrial plant and animal life, and capture and store greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Forests also provide food, water, fuel, medicine and livelihoods to billions of people.

Cargill has pledged to reduce and, ultimately, eliminate deforestation from our agricultural supply chains. We recognize that forests and farming are both critical to creating a more sustainable, food-secure future.

Our actions

Cargill uses its insights as one of the world’s largest buyers of soy, palm oil, and other crops to promote sustainable agriculture. We work with farmers, governments, environmental organizations and members of the communities in which we operate to find practical and scalable solutions. Here’s some of our progress so far:

• We’ve worked with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) since 2004 to use satellite technology to monitor and manage deforestation linked to our supply chains.
• Since 2006, Cargill has partnered with industry and environmental organizations to uphold the Brazilian Soy Moratorium in the Amazon– a voluntary agreement to not purchase soy from lands in the Amazon biome that were deforested after July 2006 – that has contributed to the 80 percent decline in deforestation in the Amazon in the last decade. The Moratorium was extended indefinitely in 2016.
• We’ve worked on sustainable palm oil since joining the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004. We issued a palm oil policy in 2014 to go a step further and eliminate any palm oil source from our supply chain that is linked to deforestation of environmentally sensitive areas including peatlands or is exploitative of indigenous communities. We release regular progress reports on our efforts.
• At the United Nations’ Climate Summit in 2014 we pledged to reduce and eventually end deforestation across our entire agricultural supply chain, with the goal of halving it by 2020 and ending it completely by 2030.
• We released a global policy on forests and detailed action plans for priority supply chains in September 2015 to share the actions we would take to halve deforestation in our supply chains by 2020 and eliminate it by 2030. It includes principles and an approach for evaluating our suppliers and our investments, based on forest protection principles.
• We released our first Report on Forests in January 2017 to describe the progress we are making on our action plans to protect forests and promote sustainable land use in our cocoa, soy, palm oil, cotton, maize and fiber-based packaging supply chains. The report covers the challenges we face and new approaches we can take to maintain progress, from building consensus around definitions and standards of measurement to coordinating within and across sectors to promote sustainable landscape approaches.

Learn more

• Cargill 2017 Report on Forests
• Cargill Policy on Forests
• Cargill Forest Protection Action Plan
• Forest Policy FAQ
• Cargill Policy on Sustainable Fiber-based Packaging