EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: SECRET INGREDIENT

Earthsight’s latest investigation traces soy linked to illegal deforestation, land grabbing, corruption, and violence against traditional communities in the Brazilian Cerrado to chicken found on the shelves of Europe’s leading supermarkets – Carrefour, Intermarché, Edeka and Albert Heijn – and in fast-food giant McDonald’s. This tainted soy, used as feed in European chicken farms, is the secret ingredient in popular chicken products that links unwitting consumers to destruction and rights abuses in the Brazilian Cerrado.

The Cerrado is a sprawling biome of grasslands, wetlands, savannahs and forests supporting 5 per cent of the world’s species and serving as a valuable carbon sink. But it is also at the epicentre of aggressive agricultural expansion that has seen half its vegetation destroyed in recent decades. In 2023, the highest portion of Cerrado deforestation was concentrated in the state of Bahia, where the three agribusinesses at the centre of Earthsight’s new investigation grow soy on hundreds of thousands of hectares (ha) of land: the Horita Group, the Franciosi Agro Group, and the Mizote Group.

Despite ties to corruption, deforestation or violence against traditional communities in the Cerrado, both Horita and Franciosi Agro are certified by the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) – a certification scheme that aims to ensure soy supply chains are ethical and sustainable. But as this investigation shows, flaws in RTRS’s standard and processes risk facilitating the greenwashing of the Cerrado’s deforesters. In response to Earthsight’s findings, RTRS has suspended the certificates for both Horita and Franciosi Agro while the scheme carries out an investigation into their compliance.

Deforestation, rights abuses and corruption

Satellite data analysis made available by MapBiomas suggests that Franciosi Agro and Mizote have cleared over 23,000ha of native Cerrado vegetation in western Bahia since January 2021 – an area almost four times the size of Manhattan. Earthsight undercover investigators found that Franciosi Agro had deforested 5,000ha – over double the area they had authorisation to clear – on its Santa Isabel farm complex between 2021 and 2023 in the municipality of Luís Eduardo Magalhães.

Further south in the municipality of Correntina, 5,778ha of native Cerrado vegetation were deforested on Mizote’s Barra Velha farm between 2022 and 2023. Earthsight has only been able to locate deforestation permits for 2,995ha of these. 

Meanwhile, several properties owned by the Horita Group are tied to allegations of land grabbing or violence against traditional communities, including a 2,169-ha property located within the Capão do Modesto community’s traditional lands in Correntina. The company is also linked to 100,000ha of properties located within the Estrondo mega agribusiness estate in Formosa do Rio Preto. Estrondo overlaps territories inhabited by traditional geraizeiro communities, who in recent years have seen their lands stolen by agribusinesses and suffered violence at the hands of Estrondo security guards. Strong evidence of land grabbing in both the Capão do Modesto and Estrondo cases has led Bahia’s Attorney General to file lawsuits against the implicated agribusinesses, including Horita. Both cases have been highlighted by the Attorney General as some of the worst examples of land grabbing in Brazil.

Walter Horita – one of the Horita Group’s owners – is implicated in one of Brazil’s largest corruption scandals. ‘Operation Far West’ exposed widespread corruption involving judges, lawyers and agribusinesses who conspired to secure favourable court rulings to legitimise 800,000ha of land grabs. Horita has been accused of bribing justice officials and is reported to have paid the equivalent of EUR4.98 million to Brazilian authorities as part of a plea bargain.

The secret ingredient in European chicken

Tainted soy from Horita, Franciosi Agro and Mizote is exported to the EU by two of the world’s largest soy traders: Bunge and Cargill. Around 90 per cent of soy entering Europe is processed into animal feed to supply the meat industry. Bunge and Cargill sell soy to leading European feed companies, including De Heus.

Chicken fed with De Heus’ animal feed is purchased by Plukon Food Group which, as Europe’s fourth largest chicken slaughterhouse, sells chicken products to shops across the EU. Earthsight investigators have identified Plukon chicken products in some of Europe’s largest retailers: Carrefour and Intermarché in France, Edeka in Germany, and Albert Heijn in the Netherlands. Plukon also supplies chicken to McDonald’s, meaning European consumers not only risk being complicit in environmental and rights abuses when they do their grocery shopping, but also when they purchase the fast-food chain’s popular chicken menu items.

RTRS and all companies mentioned in the report were contacted for comment. Their responses can be found throughout the report and accessed in full here.

The EU Deforestation Regulation

In recent decades, soy expansion has come at a severe cost to critical ecosystems and the communities that depend on them, driving millions of hectares of deforestation and exacerbating the climate and biodiversity crises. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has the potential to halt the contribution of European consumption to this destruction by requiring that EU supply chains be deforestation-free and compliant with relevant producer country laws.

Earthsight’s analysis shows that soy recently imported to the EU from western Bahia by Bunge and Cargill is exposed to forest loss that took place after the EUDR’s deforestation cut-off date of December 2020, as well as several illegalities, making these imports non-compliant with the upcoming regulation.

While the EUDR’s focus on forests excludes much of the less densely forested Cerrado, Earthsight has identified destroyed areas partially made up of forests and therefore non-compliant with the regulation.

In the run-up to the EUDR taking effect in December 2024, industry sectors with some of the largest deforestation footprints in the world and egregious track records of human rights abuses are seeking to delay and weaken the law. Earthsight’s investigation shows how, without the EUDR, EU supply chains will continue to drive environmental and human rights abuses across the globe.

Key recommendations for EU policymakers:

1. The Commission must resist the calls for delay and enforce the EUDR on time

2. To ensure that the EUDR is effectively and fully enforced, certificates offered by voluntary schemes should not be treated as evidence of compliance with the law by competent authorities

3. The EUDR must be expanded to cover not only forests but also other wooded land (OWL) to prevent unintended spillover effects to other ecosystems