Complicity on Destruction- International companies are profiting over the destruction of the Amazon

European companies are reinforcing Bolsonaro’s far-right and climate-damaging agenda and profiting over the destruction of the Brazilian environment and the indigenous genocide.

The APIB ( Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil) report entitled “Complicity on Destruction” showed for the first time how soybean, cattle, timber and sugar companies responsible for the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon under Brazil’s new president openly negotiate and receive funding from various companies in Europe and North America.

The report identifies and examines the business transactions of Brazilian companies behind the 2017-2019 increase in illegal deforestation and tracks their links to European, US and Canadian companies. The results provide insight into the role of foreign economic agents in driving agro-industrial expansion in tropical forests, as described in recent peer-reviewed studies. The APIB report is set against the backdrop of a growing trend of land invasions in Brazil, with indigenous peoples and other rural traditional communities reporting a dramatic increase in conflicts arising from efforts to expand plantations and cattle ranches on their lands.

Here are some of the results that draw the link between deforestation in Brazil and consumers in the EU and the US:

* Although new plantations have been banned in the Brazilian Amazon since 2008, sugarcane cultivation for biofuel production covers more rain forest land compared to any other biofuel crop. However, is mainly cultivated in the Cerrado where it also contributed to a significant deforestation. Plantations have faced repeated allegations of the use of slave labor. The results identified a sugar exporting company to the U.K., USA and Canada.

Usina Trapiche & Temape Group- Luiz Antonio de Andrade Bezerra The Mr. Bezerra-owned Usina trapiche was fined in $ 750,000 for illegal deforestation in the state of Pará. The Usina Trapiche is one of the main sugar and ethanol producers in northeastern Brazil. Where the company’s human rights violations made her the target of an 2013 Oxfam-led campaign resulting in PepsiCo, the Coca Cola Group and others stopping buying from the company.

The report’s research showed relationships between Usina Trapiche and ED&F Man (UK and Canada). ED&F Man, is one of the world’s leading sugar traders, refining and processing sugar among its own brands. Including Royal Ingredients in the USA. In 2017 the company imported a sugar shipment from Usina Trapiche totaling 1562 tons.

* Brighton Collectibles, an accessory store found in US malls and highways, received twenty-eight consignments of beef totaling 4.4 tons of Italian tannery Faeda, which received leather imports from Frente Redentor, a family subsidiary. BIHL Group, fined $ 1 million for illegal deforestation. The Bihl family was the target of the Brazilian Federal Police investigation in 2009, known as Operation Slaughter, which eventually put four of the Bihl brothers in prison for bribing public officials and inspectors in the company’s livestock operations.

* The British company Nordisk Timber Eireli, which extracts and markets native Amazon wood and supplies a number of leading companies in Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States. Between 2017 and 2018, Nordisk was fined $ 3.9 million for lack of environmental oversight on traded wood.

* Dozens of investors, including Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Commerzbank (Germany), BNP Paribas (France), Barclays (UK), JPMorgan Chase (US) and leading US asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street fund the Brazilian bad action companies and the global soy trading companies described in the report.