Criticisms of Cargill
This article addresses various criticisms of Cargill Inc, a privately held agribusiness multinational giant with operations in 70 countries and its headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States.
[2][3] Concerns have been raised about Cargill's environmental and human rights record in a number of industries and countries by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and other organizations since at least the early 2000s.
As a highly influential company, Cargill has been called upon to reduce its negative industrial, environmental, and societal impacts, in hopes that it would set global precedents for similar businesses.
[9] Concerns have been raised about Cargill's environmental record in a number of industries and countries by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and other organizations since at least the early 2000s.
"[4] Cargill has been called a "cartel" in a 2016 book entitled The Political Economy of Agricultural Booms: Managing Soybean Production in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
[11] By 2006, there had been hundreds of cases of social conflict documented at Cargill's oil palm plantations by NGOs, government, and Indonesia's National Human Rights Court.
[15] Palm oil is a globally traded commodity used in a wide range of consumer products, including packaged foods, cosmetics, and cleaning supplies, and as a feedstock for biofuels.
Produced in the world's tropics on industrial monoculture plantations, oil palm has severe and widespread negative impacts on the environment and local people.
It was reported at the 2008 Asian Studies Association of Australia, that local communities had lost their ancestral forests and farmland to Cargill's oil palm plantations.
At that time, Cargill was actively clearing forest in Borneo at their PT Harapan Sawit Lestari plantation without an environmental impact assessment, which was required by Indonesian law.
Covering rugged and isolated terrain, Cargill's own management had acknowledged their inability to prevent the use of child labor on their PNG plantations.
[5] In 2003, Cargill completed a port for processing soya in Santarém "on the northern end of highway BR-163" in the Amazon region of Brazil[5]: 72 which reduced transportation costs.
: 76 As local farmers cleared land in the rain forest for soya crops, in late 2003, Greenpeace launched a campaign to protest Cargill's new port.
[23] These retailers in turn put pressure on Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, André Maggi Group and Dreyfus to prove their soy was not grown on recently deforested land in the Amazon.
The construction of new ports, "terminals and barge fleets" on the Amazon River by the ABCD "trading giants"—ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus—made the soybean industry even more competitive against that of the United States.
[6] June 2007 the Australian operation of Cargill was fined A$37,500 by the New South Wales Land and Environment Court after a waste water pipeline ruptured in January 2006 which flowed into a stormwater system and into the Bomen wetland.
[26] Cargill has triggered significant controversy with its plan to build a major new housing development of as many as 32,000 people on its privately owned salt ponds in Redwood City.
Leslie was purchased by Cargill in 1978, and has continued salt-making, although under more difficult business conditions, with the opening of a large competing salt works in Baja, which is owned by Mitsubishi and the Mexican government.
Subsequently, Cargill partnered with luxury-home builder DMB Associates of Scottsdale, Arizona, which has submitted a "50/50 Plan" to build 12,000 houses, 1 Million Sq.
Reinforcements were underway, when waves churned by Hurricane Frances broke through the dike that surrounded the retention pond, spilling 65 million gallons of acidic wastewater into Tampa Bay on September 5, 2004.
"[40] Eight years after the disaster at Cargill Phosphate Company—Mosaic's Riverview Chemical Plant—Mosaic undertook initial cleanup and restoration of the mangroves and wetlands that were severely harmed by the spill.
[41] In July 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed suit against Cargill, Nestlé and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in Federal District Court in Los Angeles "filed by six former slaves who were kidnapped from their native Mali"[42] into Côte d'Ivoire and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings.
[42] According to the Los Angeles Times, the companies are "accused of aiding and abetting slave labor by giving Ivory Coast farmers financial assistance in the expectation that cocoa prices would stay low.
[46] The Environmental Justice Foundation named Cargill as a major buyer of Uzbek cotton, which is produced widely using uncompensated workers and is implicated in human rights abuses.
