United Cacao Leveled 5,000 Acres Of Peru's Rainforest So It Could Grow "Sustainable" Chocolate

[hatrack]

The satellite’s eye view from high above northern Peru in mid-2013 laid out a stark reality: Ecologist Matt Finer and his colleagues were watching “blow by blow” in a series of images from NASA’s Landsat satellite as a once-unbroken blanket of green Amazonian rainforest was giving way to neat strips of bare land. The systematic dismantling of nearly 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of decades-old, closed-canopy rainforest was at first thought to be a frontier foray into Peru’s growing oil palm sector at the time. But it soon became clear that the big push was altering the landscape for a huge estate in the remote Amazon by a company — or rather, a chain of companies controlled by self-described “serial plantations entrepreneur” Dennis Melka.

Neither the companies nor Melka were trying to hide the results of their work, at least from the people they hoped would invest in the operation through United Cacao, a publicly traded umbrella company based in the Cayman Islands. In fact, they were celebrating their progress outside the Amazonian hamlet of Tamshiyacu. At times in 2013 and 2014, crews were clearing as much as 100 hectares (250 acres) of forest a week in a bid to make United Cacao “the largest and lowest cost corporate grower of sustainable and traceable cacao beans,” according to a quote from Melka on the company’s website as it existed in 2015.

To drum up early interest ahead of United Cacao’s initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market, Melka as CEO and the company’s directors repeatedly made the case to investors and through media appearances that the developing estate in Peru would be the answer to the projected shortfalls in the raw material used to make chocolate. It would also, they said, address consumer and industry concerns about the sustainability, human rights violations and unpredictable weather in West Africa, which supplies around 70% of the world’s cacao.

But could a company that had wiped out hectare upon hectare of the Amazon forest be considered “sustainable”? No, Finer told Mongabay. “This is the definition of ‘not sustainable,’” said Finer, the director of the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a program of the organization Amazon Conservation. “From my point of view, it is not acceptable — and certainly not sustainable — to cut down standing forest, let alone primary forest, for large-scale agriculture.” In its financial disclosures, on its website and in Melka’s public statements, the position of the company was that nothing resembling forest, let alone primary forest, existed by the time the company purchased the land, mostly from title-holding farmers. United Cacao insisted that the farmers had degraded the area since the 1990s. As a result, the company couldn’t have deforested the area because few if any trees remained to be cut, so the thinking went.

EDIT



EDIT

https://news.mongabay.com/2021/05/science-refutes-united-cacaos-claim-it-didnt-deforest-peruvian-amazon/

[secondwind]

1. Sickening to see this..... and Bolsonaro is destroying

five football fields a day in Brazil of Amazon rain forest.