Rainforest Action Network

Activists demand that CEO Patricia Woertz sign pledge not to destroy rainforests

SANTA BARBARA – Actor Ed Begley, Jr., speaking today at the Wall Street Journal-sponsored ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, refuted comments made by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) CEO Patricia Woertz in which she portrayed biofuels as a solution to the climate crisis. Begley cited recent studies concluding that industrial biofuels production results in land clearing, often of tropical rainforests.

Activists from Rainforest Action Network (RAN) presented Woertz with more than 600 letters and posters from schoolchildren expressing their concerns about rainforest destruction. The activists urged Woertz to sign a pledge to not support producers that tear down rainforests to plant biofuels crops such as soy and palm oil. Woertz refused.

“We’ve witnessed forests and peatswamps in Indonesia being cleared and burned so an ADM subsidiary can expand its palm oil plantations,” said RAN Rainforest Agribusiness campaigner Brihannala Morgan, who presented Ms. Woertz with the pledge. “We want ADM to move beyond cheap talk about the benefits of biofuels and stop promoting false solutions that are worse than fossil fuels.”

“It’s important for people to hear the facts about biofuels,” said Begley. “Consumers don’t want fuels that produce more greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum, and they deserve to know what they’re getting.”

As demand for industrial biofuels, also called agrofuels, has grown in recent years, large-scale production has led to deforestation of the world’s rainforests, higher food prices, and widespread human rights abuses. Producing palm oil, one of the most popular sources of biodiesel, entails so much deforestation and land conversion that, over its lifecycle, palm-based biodiesel can emit up to 10 times more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline.

An ADM subsidiary, the Wilmar Group, is the world’s largest producer of palm-based biodiesel and is clearing tropical rainforests in Indonesia that are among the last remaining habitats of the critically endangered orangutan. U.S. agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge and Cargill account for 60 percent of the funding for Brazil’s booming soy crop. Soy has become a leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon as Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest exporter of soy, largely due to American farmers planting more corn for ethanol.

RAN and more than 50 other NGOs from around the world have called for a moratorium on agrofuels targets and incentives until standards can be developed and implemented to ensure that incentives only benefit fuels that offer significant environmental improvement over fossil fuels.