Volunteers from Manchester Greenpeace have visited the supermarket Tesco in several Greater Manchester locations to reimagine a scene from Greenpeace’s new animation, Monster, in which a jaguar turns up in a boy’s kitchen to tell him about the destruction of his forest home for industrial meat production.
Greenpeace volunteers took photos with cut-outs of the jaguar and the boy outside Tesco to raise awareness of the supermarket’s part in the destruction of forests like the Amazon. Tesco is driving this destruction by selling more soya-fed meat than any UK supermarket, much of it from companies owned by rainforest destroyers.
Melissa said, “Threatened wildlife such as jaguars are losing their homes to deforestation, so that’s why we brought these magnificent creatures to Tesco today. New Tesco CEO Ken Murphy needs to take urgent action to stop fuelling the destruction of forests like the Amazon. Tesco sells hundreds and thousands of tonnes of industrial meat, much of it produced by companies owned by rainforest-destroyers JBS. We also need to ensure that consumers realise they have the power to hold Tesco to account.”
These visits followed on from a tour by Greenpeace UK of a life-size animatronic jaguar to Tesco supermarkets in Essex, Kent, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, and London. The jaguar roared from the roof of what appeared to be a delivery van, surrounded by forest foliage. Flames engulfed Tesco’s strapline on the sides of the truck, which had been subverted to read ‘Every Little Harms’.
Devastating fires raged across Brazil this year consuming an area of land the size of the UK in places like the Amazon rainforest, Pantanal wetlands and Cerrado savannah. A major investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Greenpeace Unearthed released this week has linked retailers including Tesco, Asda, Lidl, McDonald’s and Nando’s to fires on farmland in the Brazilian Cerrado. These habitats are vital for threatened jaguar populations, globally crucial in the fight against climate change and, even more crucially, key to keeping new, potentially deadly viruses contained.
Earlier this month, the UK Government announced a new ‘due diligence’ law designed to curb deforestation in the UK supply chain but the new law will only tackle deforestation deemed illegal in the country of origin rather than all deforestation. This will allow UK companies to continue buying from those operating in countries like Brazil where the Bolsonaro government is systematically dismantling forest protection, rather than finally forcing retailers to end all deforestation in the food system as they promised ten years ago.
Tesco, along with other supermarkets, wrote to the Government calling for the law to be strengthened. And yet the supermarket still welcomed it, while continuing to buy meat from companies owned by JBS. JBS is the world’s biggest meatpacking company, which has been repeatedly linked to deforestation in the Amazon, as well as human rights violations.
Melissa said, “I just watched Greenpeace’s new film Monster, and I’m horrified at the true extent of the devastation of forests like the Amazon caused by industrial meat production. The local choices we make in Manchester can have global consequences. We can start by reducing our meat consumption.”
