Chocolate CEO Bleats About "Sustainble" Cacao, Levels Primary Forest In Peru To Grow The Stuff

[hatrack]

A cacao grower with roots in Southeast Asia’s palm oil industry has set up shop in the Peruvian Amazon. The CEO of United Cacao has told the international press that he wants to change the industry for the better, and Peru seems to provide the right conditions and climate, both for the plants themselves and the business.

But a cadre of scientists and conservation groups charge that United Cacao, through its “wholly owned” subsidiary in Peru, Cacao del Peru Norte, has quietly cut down more than 2,000 hectares of primary, closed-canopy rainforest near Iquitos, a city of about half a million that has the distinction of being the largest city in the world that’s not accessible by road.



Google Earth satellite imagery captured in 2015 shows the extent of the clearing. The site is about 3.5 miles long and 2 miles wide (5.6-by-3.2 kilometers). Tamshiyacu is the closest town. Click to enlarge.


Zooming in reveals what appear to be felled trees. Click to enlarge.

EDIT

That some sort of clearing occurred, as well as who was responsible for it, is not in doubt. In its own financial documents and on its website, United Cacao tells investors that, in May 2013, the company and its partners began “clearing and infrastructure work” to ready the land that it had purchased earlier in the year from local farmers for a cacao plantation. United Cacao maintains, however, that this area had been used for farming since the late 1990s, and thus it was not primary forest. “Before they bought the land, there was agriculture,” said Ed Portman, a spokesperson for United Cacao. “There was no high-conservation-value forest on that land.” Furthermore, the company argues on its website that the land was “heavily logged of all tropical hardwoods in the 1980s.”

That’s debatable, said Finer. Based on Landsat imagery from 1985, in addition to original analysis by Finer and his colleagues from 1989 to the present, he explained that the area was "certainly not heavily logged or clear cut” and “was still very much intact, closed-canopy forest at that time.” Finer added, “Although the area, like much of the Amazon, may have been selectively logged at some point, we still consider it primary forest based on the imagery.”

EDIT

http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0120-gfrn-cannon-company-clears-forest-for-chocolate.html

[Nihil]

1. Well, with a pedigree like that, who could doubt him?

> A cacao grower with roots in Southeast Asia’s palm oil industry ...

> told the international press that he wants to change the industry for the better

Just like he did for the palm-oil industry at the price of Orang utans, Sumatran tigers, ...