A recent report by the nonprofit Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV) found that the operations of French retailer Casino Group in Brazil could be linked to more than half a million hectares of deforestation between 2018 and 2023. According to ICV, 526,459 hectares (approximately 1.3 million acres) of native vegetation — an area about 50 times the size of Paris — was cleared largely in the Amazon Rainforest to raise cattle for the company’s beef supply chain. The findings are the latest in a series of deforestation allegations against the French retailer in Latin America, where it operated more than 3,000 grocery stores until recently. In 2021, a coalition of 11 Colombian and Brazilian environmental and Indigenous organizations sued Casino Group in France for environmental damage and human rights violations. The case remains ongoing in the Paris courts. Raquel Carvalho, author of the ICV report, told Mongabay that it took a year to uncover the new data. “There’s great difficulty in measuring the deforestation caused by beef sold in grocery stores,” she said. “The main challenge is the lack of traceability between cattle suppliers and these stores. We have animal transport documents that track cattle from ranches to slaughterhouses, but the paper trail ends there.” In the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado savanna, clearing forests for pastureland remains widespread. Image courtesy of the Casino Case coalition. Researchers worked around this challenge by calculating the total beef traded by two Casino-owned retail chains in Brazil and estimating the amount of new pasture…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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