Posted on June 9, 2015
Zooming In: “Sustainable” Cocoa Producer Destroys Pristine Forest in Peru
By Octavia Payne and Sarah Alix Mann
This article originally appeared on Insights.
United Cacao, a publicly-traded, commercial producer of the raw material that goes into chocolate—its symbol on the London Stock Exchange is CHOC—has earned some unwelcome attention recently for its large-scale clearing of trees in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon. Reports about the clearing of over 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of trees in Intact Forest Landscapes first emerged from Mongabay, then at outlets including Confectionary News, Ojo Público, and The Guardian. Intact Forest Landscapes are the world’s last remaining large undisturbed forests, containing no signs of fragmentation by infrastructure and logging such as roads, mining and oil and gas development. The Amazon is the world’s largest remaining continuous Intact Forest Landscape.
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Peru’s government initially ordered United Cacao to halt operations, as environmental impact assessments and land use rights were called into question. Yet, a local court recently ruled the clearing to be legal, which allowed United Cacao to resume clearing and planting. This suggests that as cacao production expands in Latin America, and companies like United Cacao set their sights on fertile forested regions, such activities could become a trend.
