Silent but Deadly – Estimating the real climate impact of agribusiness corporations
Type: Reports
Date: 6 December 2015
Campaigns: Food
The agribusiness industry presents itself as part of the solution to climate change. The major firms spend significant sums to promote the message that corporate, industrial agriculture is compatible with fighting climate change. But they are wrong. This report demonstrates that multinational agribusiness companies are part of the problem, not the solution, by revealing the true extent of their overall contribution to dangerous climate change. So far, most agribusiness companies have got away with underestimating their true impact because they only declare their direct emissions. Many emissions are not direct, but arise from the end use of their products or from their supply chains.
These hidden emissions tend not to be disclosed in company reports but it is possible to estimate them by extrapolating from existing public data. In Silent but Deadly, we have used this information to estimate the real climate impact of three companies: Cargill, Yara and Tyson, which are amongst the world’s biggest firms in the cattle feed, nitrous fertiliser and beef industries respectively