cattle ranching

Cattle ranched on deforested areas of the Amazon. There's going to be less of this, thanks to you

In what our executive director is calling "a significant victory in the fight to save the Amazon," four of the largest cattle companies in the world are joining forces to ban the purchase of cattle from areas of cleared rainforest in Brazil.

This success is the culmination of our Slaughtering The Amazon campaign, which began back in June. The report which launched the campaign showed that cattle ranching is the single biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon, and that four-fifths of the areas that have been deforested now have cattle on them.

In the latest step forward for our Amazon campaign which began with the publication of Slaughtering the Amazon, Bertin, the world's largest leather exporter, is finally doing the right thing and backing the call for a moratorium on buying cattle from farms responsible for Amazon deforestation.

In a significant move in the dynamic between beef production in Brazil and deforestation in the Amazon, this week Marfrig - one of the biggest producers of beef products in the world - issued a statement that they will stop buying beef ranched on deforested areas in the Amazon.

Think about what causes climate change. The immediate visual vocabulary that springs to mind is of power station chimneys, jumbo jets criss-crossing the sky, maybe colossal container ships circling the globe. You're probably not thinking of a glossy trainer advert.