Greenpeace volunteer Rod Thick said ‘75 customers in Worthing want Tesco CEO Ken Murphy to mark his one year at the top by dropping rainforest destroying companies from the supermarket’s supply chain. Shoppers also know that anything less than a plan for meat reduction is just chicken feed and won’t fix our forests, stabilize our climate or give customers the option to make affordable, healthy choices that don’t harm our planet.’

As of late October, concerned customers have brought the message that ‘Tesco meat = deforestation’, to nearly 1000 of Tesco’s almost 3000 stores, with many more visits planned in the coming weeks. Throughout May and June, Greenpeace volunteers also stencilled this message outside more than 270 stores, including in Worthing. Activists then peacefully confronted delegates at Tesco’s Annual General Meeting in June, holding giant letters spelling out the words ‘FOREST CRIME’. Greenpeace has recently published an open letter calling on Tesco yet again to stop funding Amazon destruction [1], and released a film [2] in September exposing how Tesco is linked to the destruction of forests across Brazil.

Tesco’s recently announced ‘Net Zero’ pledge [3] completely ignores the impact that producing industrial meat and dairy has on the climate crisis. Furthermore, despite Tesco claiming to have met its deforestation targets, its meat is not deforestation-free. It buys British chicken and pork from suppliers owned by notorious rainforest-destroyer, JBS. JBS recently admitted it would accept deforestation in its supply chain for another 14 years [4]. And Tesco continues to sell more soya-fed, factory-farmed meat than any other UK supermarket. It has already failed to keep its promise of zero-deforestation by 2020 and its plans to buy soya ‘only from deforestation-free areas’ by 2025 are meaningless given the complete collapse in 2019 of talks involving traders like Cargill to agree protection for whole areas from soya [5]. 

Rod Thick continued, ‘Instead of coming out with meaningless, greenwashing pledges, Tesco should face up to the fact that meat it sells is contributing to the destruction of the Amazon and other vital ecosystems across Brazil, which is threatening Indigenous Peoples, pushing wildlife to the brink of extinction and exacerbating the climate crisis. Greenpeace Arun and Adur will keep bringing the message that Tesco meat = deforestation directly to its stores until the UK’s largest supermarket lives up to its promise to remove deforestation from its supply chain.’

People who would like to take action at their local Tesco store can apply for a free action pack at act.gp/tesco-pack to receive resources to get Tesco’s attention.