AMHERST — An Amherst College graduate and current trustee at the school is drawing the ire of an environmentalist advocacy group.
The organization Mighty Earth recently took aim at the agricultural behemoth Cargill in a report titled “Cargill: The Worst Company In the World,” which slams the corporation’s record on deforestation, labor exploitation and other abuses. And David MacLennan, Cargill’s CEO who began a six-year tenure as an Amherst College trustee last July, was not spared criticism.
“While Mr. MacLennan seems to want to do the right thing, he appears unable to decide between those who believe Cargill can do better and those who want to keep the bulldozers running,” Henry Waxman, the former California congressman and current chairman of Mighty Earth, wrote in the report. “Unfortunately, because the status quo is deforestation, child labor, and pollution, Cargill’s dithering results in a continuing environmental and human rights disaster.”
Cargill is an American global corporation involved in agricultural commodities, livestock feed, production of food ingredients and energy trading, among other things.
The criticism comes after Amherst College announced early this year its plan to go “carbon neutral” by 2030, transitioning campus energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. When that announcement was made, the college said that powering campus with fossil fuels was “at odds with our moral imperative to address climate change” and that the school wanted to “remove this paradox.”
College spokeswoman Caroline Hanna did not respond to questions from the Gazette. Instead, she provided a statement from Andrew Nussbaum, the chairman of Amherst’s board of trustees and a partner at the powerhouse corporate law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
“Dave is a superb colleague on our board and has been a thoughtful and consistent supporter of the College’s climate action plan and its commitment, announced in January 2019, to reach carbon neutrality by 2030,” said Nussbaum. “We are lucky to have his expertise and generosity.”
Mighty Earth’s report slams Cargill’s record on everything from labor abuses and violence against indigenous communities to health code compliance. The environmental damage created by Cargill’s supply chain draws particular focus in the study.
In 2014, at the United Nations Climate Summit, MacLennan announced that Cargill was signing the New York Declaration on Forests — a non-binding agreement meant to cut the rate of deforestation in half by 2020, and to end it altogether by 2030. But after environmentalists lauded Cargill for the move, Mighty Earth claims, the company did little to abide by those promises.
“Since the signing of the Declaration, Cargill has continued to drive the destruction of pristine landscapes, remaining one of the worst actors on the world stage, and one of the greatest threats to native ecosystems across the globe,” the report reads.
Specifically, the report says that Cargill’s role in deforestation is the giant market it creates for soy grown on clear-cut land. More than 75 percent of all soy grown worldwide is used to feed livestock, and Cargill’s purchase of soy grown on land cleared of its natural vegetation makes it “one of the two largest customers of industrial scale deforestation,” the report says.
“Deforestation for soy production accelerates climate change through the release of carbon, destroys wildlife habitat, and disrupts hydrological cycles, limiting the availability of water,” it reads.
The same logging that opens land for soy production can displace indigenous communities, often through violence, the report adds.
In a statement to the Gazette, Cargill spokeswoman April Nelson said that Cargill has “never wavered” in its commitment to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains.
“We stand by our commitment to the NY Declaration on Forests to end deforestation in our supply chains and are accelerating our efforts to achieve it,” the statement reads, adding that the company is “focused on the highest-risk supply chains: cocoa, palm and soy.”
In its statement, Cargill noted the actions it has taken this year — a “sustainable soy policy and action plan,” an updated “palm grievance policy,” the launch of an “expanded human rights commitment … protecting workers and indigenous people” and collaboration with others in industry, environmental groups and other partners to find solutions to deforestation.
Speaking about MacLennan’s role on Amherst College’s board, the company said that his work on carbon reduction “is fully consistent with how he leads Cargill,” mentioning the company’s recent 12 percent reduction in shipping emissions.
Ashwin Ravikumar, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Amherst College, said he’s not specifically familiar with Cargill’s activities in Brazil, which was a large focus of Mighty Earth’s report. But he said that often, groups like Mighty Earth will publish reports in order to mobilize consumers in the global north to make demands of companies that are complicit in harming the environment.
The tactic has had some success in reducing environmental abuses, Ravikumar said. But far more effective is governmental planning and regulation, often spurred by activism from environmental and indigenous groups, he added, pointing to the successes of the Brazilian labor organizer and environmentalist Chico Mendes in the 1980s.
As for MacLennan’s role as an Amherst College trustee, Ravikumar said it is not surprising, given the fact that board members at colleges like Amherst often come from the top of industry.
Ravikumar noted that at a time when Brazil’s government is rapidly rolling back environmental protections, the college should consider the signals it sends by having someone like MacLennan on the board. Currently, Brazil’s president is the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, who has promised to open up the Amazon to agriculture, logging and mining — a fact highlighted by Mighty Earth’s report.
Ravikumar said it took student activism to push the college to implement a climate action plan like the one it announced earlier this year.
“Making sure that this plan is implemented in a way that is true to the values that inspired it in the first place is going to require sustained activism,” he said.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.