In 2023, Mighty Earth launched a major campaign and report on saving the Cerrado with a focus on Bunge, one of Brazil’s largest soy exporters, and its buyers in the meat industry in the EU. Trase data was used to identify high-risk municipalities where Bunge is a dominant exporter to EU countries and the EU countries with the highest exposure to the Cerrado.
In response to this campaign and direct engagement by Mighty Earth and Deutsche Umwelthilfe with more than 100 companies based in EU countries with high exposure to the Cerrado, a group of supermarkets including Carrefour, Casino, Ahold Delhaize, Jumbo and Aldi, launched investigations to detect potential links to deforestation in their supply chains. As a result, a number of companies including Agravis and Cooperl stopped sourcing from Bunge in South America.
Trase is a rigorous and valued strategic partner in driving industry transformation to protect nature and climate. Mighty Earth relied on high-quality Trase data for our groundbreaking, four-country report called Saving The Cerrado: Why Bunge, Supermarkets and Governments Must Act Fast, which we published in June 2023. The highly accurate and freely available Trase data provided us with crucial, municipality-focused evidence that confirmed giant US soy trader Bunge was the largest recipient and exporter of deforestation and conversion-risk soy from the threatened Cerrado savannah in Brazil. We then used this evidence, as well as Trase data linking Bunge to downstream markets, to lobby over a hundred retailers, meat companies, and animal feed companies in France, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany.
Alex Armstrong, Vice President of Programs, Mighty Earth