Deforestation in the Amazon

Neil Parish Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. Mr McCabe. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) for bringing the debate to Westminster Hall. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) who is a very able member of the Select Committee on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which I chair.

Talking about the deforestation of the Amazon and, in particular, about what is happening in Brazil is a good reason for us to be here this afternoon. The Environment Bill is now in Committee in the Lords and offers a welcome opportunity for the UK to show global leadership in protecting the Amazon. The due diligence obligations will see companies that play a role in producing key commodities such as soya and palm oil held accountable for the illegal deforestation in their supply chains.

Although those due diligence obligations are welcome, they do not go far enough to protect the Amazon and other crucial, natural ecosystems, or to meet the UK’s global goals on climate and nature. The deforestation amendments I tabled unsuccessfully in the House of Commons were targeted towards ensuring that big businesses are not bankrolled. Those big businesses in Brazil that carry out cattle ranching, driving the cattle towards the Amazon, and ploughing up the savannah to grow soya, removing the rights of indigenous people, are being bankrolled by major UK institutions, such as HSBC, Santander and Barclays, which have investments in those big agribusinesses.

The Global Witness “Money to Burn” report shows that UK banks invested £5 billion between 2013 and 2019 in companies that are illegally deforesting land, such as those in the Amazon. We may not be conscious of it but our own pension funds in the House of Commons may well contribute to that by having investments in those institutions.

In a capitalist system, if those businesses are starved of capital they are brought to some recognition of the huge damage that they are doing. They are causing huge environmental damage; if we did them financial damage they would listen more carefully.

That is why I am so keen for this to happen, and I shall be interested to hear what our Minister has to say.

In December 2020, Global Witness, in “Beef, Banks and the Brazilian Amazon”, found that Brazil’s three largest beef companies are linked to tens of thousands of hectares of illegal deforestation, despite auditors saying otherwise. In just one state, over three years, beef giants JBS, Marfrig and Minerva brought cattle from a combined 379 ranches, containing 20,000 football fields-worth of illegal deforestation. In this year alone, an area twice the size of Devon has been deforested. While we stand here and speak, deforestation is going on at an alarming rate.

We have to remember that, although trees are valuable in every country in which they are grown, we would need to grow three trees here to hold the amount of carbon that a tree in the rainforest holds. We need to wake up to that. I understand that Brazil is a sovereign country and that it needs to make its decisions, but it cannot make decisions that are seriously damaging—literally—the health and sometimes the lives of indigenous people in Brazil and are causing so much degradation to our global climate. As we move forward as a country towards ensuring we have a much greener environment, we have to look to the rest of the world to deliver on that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell made a point about the Chinese, who are very hungry for minerals and all sorts of commodities, including soya for feeding their cattle and their people, but they too must be very conscious of where this is coming from. We can all work together to deliver on this. Overall, the people of Brazil would benefit from a regime that did not deforest.

Finally, to put my farming hat on, one of the problems that I have with what they do in Brazil is that they basically burn down the rainforest and plough it up, using all the fertility in the soil, and then move on to some more rainforest, abandoning the land after taking the fertility that has probably taken hundreds of thousands of years to deliver. Even from a farming perspective, it is ruinous. That is why I say bluntly that we need to listen to this debate very clearly. I look forward to the Minister taking the points that we are making very seriously. This is very much a cross-party issue, and is very much for the good of this country. In this case, we have to give clear guidance to the Brazilians about the impact of the policies of the present President of Brazil and where they are leading the country.