The British government has stated that they wish to end illegal deforestation. This this is a good aim, to be sure, however it obviously isn’t anywhere near enough.
The deforestation that has gone on in Indonesia over the last few decades has been totally legal, someone has said that land can be turned into palm plantations, even if someone else has said that land is supposed to be in a national park.
Frankly the government is on the wrong side of this argument. The people understand the deforestation must stop, indeed the majority of British people have understood this for years, and in most countries where deforestation is continuing there is more than enough deforested land to be used for the purposes they want it.
Other than McDonald’s these 21 signatories also include including Unilever, Tesco, Lidl, Nando’s, Nestle, the convenience food maker Greencore and the chicken producer Pilgrim’s Pride.
Now with some of these companies such as Unilever have been accuse of creating the need for deforestation.
Regardless of what the British government does they must be held to this signature demand.
The government should be leading, though at the moment they seem to have given up their leadership role on the climate change fight and the fight to halt the loss of wild species and wild areas.
Furthermore the government’s plans on these rules, would only apply to big companies: medium and small companies would be allowed to carry on.
This simply isn’t good enough,quite apart from anything this would allow the big company is to simply employ locals to do the dirty work for them.
The government suggested that by dealing with illegal deforestation first they can reduce the rate of deforestation dramatically, and indeed by replanting forests that have been degraded forest cover can grow. While this is true it isn’t enough. Often legal deforestation does not follow a sensible pattern.
One example of this is Herakle farms, a British owned company that raised 100 square miles of rain-forest in the last intact area of the Congo. They had all the permits, but this area simply shouldn’t have been used.
A recent survey by WWF suggested that 67% or 2 in 3 people wanted the government to do more to combat deforestation, both so-called legal and illegal.
Some of this group though does not meet the the requirements of some of the others.for instance McDonald’s has said that they will eliminate deforestation from their food chain by 2030 however that is way too late.
I found it odd that the article ended buy palm all alliance saying that we needed to be careful and allow the small scale deforestation by people to grow foods- however it has been palm oil companies that have got locals to set up farms for that in many regions and this small-scale work has started the deforestation,the palm oil company has then moved in and deforested more.