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I don’t believe we have many McDonalds devotees in the audience (please correct me if I am wrong), so this news is probably not going so shatter any treehugger’s illusions! Nevertheless the article that John Vidal published in the Guardian yesterday makes for some startling reading. A recent report on the Brazilian soy bean industry, led by Greenpeace investigators, ‘follows a 7,000km chain that starts with the clearing of virgin forest by farmers and leads directly to Chicken McNuggets being sold in British and European fast food restaurants.’ There are however several steps in the food chain before they arrive at the conclusion that McDonalds is to blame for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. First stop, after the farmers, is the ‘US agribusiness giant Cargill, which has built a port and 13 soya storage works in the Amazon region. It provides farmers with seeds and agrochemicals to grow hundreds of thousands of tonnes of beans a year.’

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Originally by leonora from Treehugger on April 7, 2006, 7:12am