OPINION
Coles last week confirmed it will bow to activist pressure and aim to eliminate “deforestation” from its supply chains, just as Woolworths did last year.
In doing so the Boards of both supermarkets have missed a golden opportunity to push back on the activist groups trying to make it harder to produce beef by reinforcing the importance of meat in diets and the need for animals on landscapes.
The supermarkets are in a unique position, they have a deep knowledge of livestock production through relationships they have built over decades and they have the ability to talk to millions of Australian consumers every day.
Instead, the supermarket Boards have committed to eliminating “deforestation” from their supply chains on the back of environmental groups aligning them to systemic habitat destruction in the beef industry.
The activist campaigns leave out the fact that no plant-based food can be produced at scale without some form of land clearing or the fact that Australian beef producers are governed by 136 different State, Territory and Federal laws relating to vegetation management, as Cattle Australia pointed out last week.
Scientists from across the world have come together in recent years to raise concerns about anti-meat campaigns creeping into policies which they have warned will result in reduced access to nutrient-dense food and adverse impacts on the environment.
They started in 2022 with the Dublin Declaration calling on scientists to recognise meat and livestock as essential to human diets and healthy landscape management. The declaration has now been signed by more than 1200 verified independent scientists across the world. Last year their Denver Call to Action asked policymakers to follow.
The Dublin Declaration scientists have not sought to control the supermarkets or policymakers in general, in their words they are just trying to put rigorous, science-based evidence in front of them.
Their movement has given a platform to a growing body of research linking red meat to positive health outcomes and the naturally symbiotic advantages of animals grazing on landscapes.
Activist groups instigated the deforestation policies
One of the main agitators pushing the supermarkets to set “deforestation” targets has been the World Wildlife Fund.
The WWF is one of five founding partners of the “Science Based Targets initiative”, formed in 2015 to pressure organisations to set strict environmental targets. The SBTi sets out a complete guide of how companies can frame their targets, right down to what they can and cannot say.
In 2021 WWF released a paper called “deforestation fronts” which equated land management on Australian cattle stations with clearing of virgin Amazon rainforest. WWF has released further reports stating the Australian beef industry has a “deforestation” problem.
A primary reservation industry groups have expressed about the deforestation reports is their heavy reliance on satellite data, which paints everything as “deforestation” even if it is weed control or regular regrowth control.
Beef Central tackled the subject with several Central Qld producers last year, who were managing for deep-rooted trees, legumes and groundcover while being painted as “deforesters” by the reports.
Another issue is the negative environmental impacts caused by woodland thickening, which has been highlighted for decades by former Qld chief scientist Dr Bill Burrows and several producers.
However, based on the idea that the Australian beef industry has a “deforestation” problem, the SBTi put pressure on Coles and Woolworths to commit to a “no deforestation” target by 2025.
The Woolworths Board signed up to deforestation targets through the SBTi in 2020, before Coles signed up in 2023.
It was years before they would publicly reveal that commitment to the thousands of farming businesses that rely heavily on the supermarket giants for market access.
Groups that were aware that those behind-closed-doors commitments had been made – such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society – piled on with their own campaigns of public pressure against the beef industry.
They ran campaigns on social media superimposing pictures of koalas in meat wrappers on supermarket shelves and conducted public protests at supermarket Board meetings.
Knowing the supermarkets had already committed to these targets some years ago ensured a guaranteed win for the environmental groups, which used the issue to call for more donations to keep their lobbying efforts going.
Deforestation campaigns prompt industry backlash
The deforestation campaigns from environmental groups against the industry was one of the main topics of discussion at last year’s Cattle Australia conference in Tamworth.
In a crowded forum, Central Qld producer Joanne Rea observed that activist groups never give credit to industry for any allowance made in response to activist pressure. She said they just move onto the next campaign and “set the bar higher” for the industry.
Cattle Australia sought to bring all parties, including activist groups and supermarkets, to the same table in recent years as it worked to determine a definition of deforestation that can be applied appropriately to the Australian context, resulting in the science-based “Land Management Commitment” it released last year.
As if on cue, the commitment was instantly publicly derided by the World Wildlife Fund, The Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society.
The supermarket Boards have stopped short of publicly backing the Land Management Commitment in setting their deforestation targets. Coles says it is working on a “beef roadmap” and Woolworths says it is “working with industry”.
While activists have threated to drive a consumer backlash against the supermarkets, hard evidence suggesting they have the level of real-world influence to sway consumers enmasse is somewhat lacking.
Perhaps it was no surprise that the loudest cheer at the strongly attended Cattle Australia conference last year was reserved for Joanne Rae when she publicly urged the industry to stop being so polite and take the fight up to the environmental groups that have been actively working to undermine the industry for years.
Picture a future where Coles and Woolworths didn’t sell, or only sold very little beef. I can remember when Coles was a “variety store” and hardly sold any food. When I was born, Woolworths didn’t exist. Yet there have always been independent butchers and people have always managed to buy beef. Alternative retail pathways to the big supermarkets already exist. They have much reduced in number over the years due to competition from the supermarkets, but they are still readily available to most consumers, often nearby to the supermarkets. The challenge would be to get the supply chain efficiency and cost competitiveness of the big supermarkets into the supply to smaller retailers so that higher prices did not reduce domestic consumption. The supply chains may look different. Cattle may be slaughtered locally in smaller highly efficient or robotic plants, rather than being carted to a few large processors and the beef then freighted across states.
Activists seem successful at infiltrating and influencing a few large corporate decision makers, but how successful would they be at influencing the supply and sourcing of thousands of smaller, independent retailers?
Of course we must always be sensitive in our production systems to consumer sentiments and doing the right things by our animals and the environment. In our present situation however, there is a very wide gap between consumer sentiment and the ideological views of a relatively small number of well-fed activists.
Thank you Beef Central for Eric’s excellent article to spark the discussion.
Thank you Eric Barker for a very good facts based roundup of the constant pressure our industry is under from environmental groups.
I am glad that you mentioned Science Based Targets Initiative [SBTi].
SBTi is one of many WWF inspired groups designed to pressure industry and their bankers into submitting to their agendas. It is significant that many banks in the US have resigned from net zero based organisations since Donald Trump became President.
The article might not mention that the supermarkets have been under pressure from bankers, investors and shareholders specifically, but those of us who follow the issue certainly know of it and take account of it. Environmental organisations have a hand in it at every level, particularly WWF.
Normal investors and shareholders are not the problem. Superannuation funds and other institutional investors pay what are called “proxy advisors” to inform them on how to vote at a company AGM. These proxy advisors are lobbied very hard by environmental organisations. Just have a look at Greenpeace’s website. Green organisations also buy shares and put their own candidates up for boards.
If we are to seriously tackle this issue, we need to present ourselves, with proxies in hand, to the AGM and tackle the issue, and the green groups pushing it, head on. We will certainly not have enough proxies to roll a vote, but we may get to present some facts.
Also appreciated are the extensive articles that Beef Central have done on the Dublin Declaration scientists. They have rebutted a lot of the misinformation about red meat and highlighted its nutritional benefits, but some influential journals have refused to withdraw flawed papers, that they have drawn attention to, and whose authors have refused to provide base data for.
Once again, I would like to express my appreciation to Eric Barker and Beef Central. You do a great job.
This peice ignores the financial pressure the retailers are under from their investors and shareholders. Yes, NGOs have a big impact, but the biggest is coming from the financial institutions.
The LMC also lacks scientific rigor, and is based purely on legislation. What will happen if legislation changes to be more strict, will the LMC maintain its position?
WHY would we expect & rely on supermarkets to “reinforce the importance of meat in diets and the need for animals on landscapes”??
That is a very strange statement!
That is NOT the job of supermarkets … THAT IS THE JOB of our marketing department in MLA & our advocacy department in CA!!
In their neglect of this duty & utter absence, anti-meat activists have filled the void.
No point playing the victim & blaming the supermarkets.
This is entirely our own fault … question is, are we ever going to step into the space & DO SOMETHING about it??
Industry has been its own worst enemy all along. Joanne is well versed on this subject and is very correct in saying Industry it is far too polite. Industry would not be in the position it is today had the fight been taken up with vigorous attempt years earlier. Instead there has been silence. More education, scientific papers showing the real story with regular advertising on social media and open media platforms need to be funded by peak bodies regularly showing that the industry is in good shape, it is responsible and most of all it needs to confront or challenge regularly with relentless action, activist’s that are trying to destroy the industry with false information. The industry needs to sell itself because the public are being brainwashed that farming is bad for the environment. In schools and universities the retric is rife that farmers are damaging to our society.
Fight or fall.
Australian major supermarkets are just not over there breif in relation to perceived deforestation. Cattle Australia tried to show the massive differences between WWF plus definition of deforestation and what is a sensible definition for Australian rangelands. I support CA approach.