Southwark Greenpeace accuse supermarket chain Tesco of ‘greenwashing’
Southwark Greenpeace have accused the supermarket chain Tesco of ‘greenwashing’.
The environmental campaign has called on the food store to cut ties with meat suppliers that contribute to deforestation.
The criticism follows a recently published article by Tesco’s CEO Ken Murphy in The Grocer on the need for the food sector to take collective action on climate change.
Greenpeace have accused Mr Murphy of failing to mention the link between meat, deforestation and the climate emergency.
Flick Brown, a Greenpeace volunteer from the Walworth area, said: ‘For Ken Murphy to talk about why the food sector needs collective action on climate change, but not to mention that soya-fed, industrially farmed pigs, cows or chickens exacerbate this problem, is like failing to mention the role of the iceberg in the sinking of the Titanic.
“Tesco sells hundreds and thousands of tonnes of industrial meat, much of it produced by companies owned by rainforest-destroyers JBS.
“Mr Murphy must commit to replacing half the meat Tesco sells with plant-based food by 2025.
“If he’s still unclear as to why meat = deforestation he’s welcome to join us at our next Southwark Greenpeace Group meeting and we’ll happily talk him through it.”
According to Greenpeace, Tesco sells more soya-fed meat than any UK supermarket, much of it from companies owned by rainforest destroyers.
Last June, a message stencilled in yellow chalk saying ‘Tesco meat = deforestation’ appeared outside four stores in Peckham, as part of a nationwide protest in which messages appeared outside more than 150 Tesco stores.
Zeb Mattey, a Southwark Greenpeace volunteer, said: “Companies like JBS, who supply Tesco via their subsidiaries, have been burning swathes of rainforest in the Amazon illegally to plant soy.
“As species face extinction and CO2 levels rise, is it really enough for Tesco to only cease deforestation fuelled soy by 2025?
“Why not move to lawful, sustainable practices now in the midst of a climate emergency?”
A major investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Greenpeace Unearthed has linked retailers including Tesco, Asda, Lidl, McDonalds and Nando’s to fires on farmland in the Brazilian Cerrado.
These habitats are the homes of Indigenous Peoples and wildlife, globally important in the fight against climate change and, ever more crucially, key to keeping new, potentially deadly viruses contained.
A spokeswoman for Tesco supermarket said: “While several leading UK retailers continue to sell Brazilian beef, we stopped selling it in early 2018 due to concerns over deforestation.
“Our suppliers do source the majority of soy used in animal feed from Brazil.
“All of our suppliers must meet our environmental and zero deforestation standards.
“Working with suppliers, we met the 2020 industry-wide target of ‘zero net deforestation’ for our own direct soy sourcing a year early.
“We know this isn’t sufficient to ensure deforestation is prevented across the sector, which is why we’ve set an additional industry-leading target for the soy we use in the UK to be from entire areas that are verified deforestation-free by 2025.”