How Your Food and Fashion Choices Affect the Amazon

Photo: Paul Kline / Istock/Istock

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Some of the most familiar brands of shoes, cars and beef are abetting the destruction of the Amazon rainforest -- and so are we -- according to a new Greenpeace report.

The group conducted a three-year study that traced the leather used in consumer products like shoes and car interiors back through various suppliers to its source on cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon. These ranches cutting new swaths from the Amazonian jungle are the single largest contributor to global deforestation, representing 14% of all forests lost each year, according to Greenpeace. An acre of rainforest is lost every eight seconds, and the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from deforestation help make Brazil the world's No. 4 greenhouse gas polluter in the world.

So which brands bankroll -- often unwittingly -- the destruction of the Amazon, and consequently the world climate? According to Greenpeace, U.S. brands include Adidas, Boss, Clarks, Eagle Ottawa (which supplies car interiors for BMW, Ford, Honda, Toyota and others), Geox, Gucci, Hilfiger, IKEA, Kraft, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Prada, Reebok, Timberland and Wal-Mart.

The advocacy group urged consumers to ask those brands to clean up their supply chains, so that they source leather from ranches that don't eat up the rainforest. A similar effort in 2006 is credited with stopping the rate of deforestation from soy farming in the Amazon.

Greenpeace lodges its biggest criticism, though, against the government of Brazil, which it says has supported the growth in the nation's cattle industry (which at 200 million head is the largest in the world) at the same time that it is a part owner of three of the nation's largest cattle businesses, Bertin, JBS and Marfrig.

A recent NASA analysis illustrates how deforestation spread so quickly through the Amazon, using the western state of Rondonia, where about one in three acres of forest has been cleared:

"Deforestation follows a fairly predictable pattern in these images. The first clearings that appear in the forest are in a fishbone pattern, arrayed along the edges of roads. Over time, the fishbones collapse into a mixture of forest remnants, cleared areas, and settlements. This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture."

These two images, of the same land in 2000 and 2008, illustrate the rate of change in the Amazonian landscape in Brazil's Rondonia state:

Amazon Deforestation - 2000

Amazon Deforestation - 2008

Separately from the Greenpeace effort, 33 non-profit groups are lobbying Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to create 2,200 square miles of "extractive reserves" where traditional subsistence fishing and nut collecting could continue, but ranching, large-scale farming and other activities would be prevented.

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