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News Article
Rainforest Action Network
PRESS RELEASE
Rainforest Action Network to Protest Bunge Shareholders Meeting
For Immediate Release:
May 20, 2008
WHAT: Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and social justice activists will gather at the entrance to Bunge Corp.’s annual shareholders meeting to protest the agribusiness’s record profits stemming from dangerously high food prices, deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, and use of slave labor.
WHEN: Friday, May 23 at 9 a.m.
WHERE: The entrance of Sofitel Hotel, 45 W. 44 St., New York.
WHO: RAN campaigner Andrea Samulon and Judson Barros of the Brazilian environmental group FUANAGUAS, which has been involved in a legal battle with Bunge for its violation of environmental laws, will speak as proxy-holders inside the meeting. They will be available afterwards for interview. The protest is being organized by Rainforest Action Network, with support from hunger strikers organized through the Community Farm Alliance (CFA), the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI), the Oakland Institute (OI), the Kentucky Interfaith Taskforce on Latin America and the Caribbean (KITLAC), and Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville (SAL).
VISUALS: Protest will include hunger strikers and banners reading “Bunge Biofuels: Driving World Hunger” and “Bunge Profits From Slave Labor.”
WHY: The increasing use of food crops to make industrial-scale biofuels is contributing to record-high global food prices, causing many of the world’s poor to go hungry. Bunge produces biofuels and other commodity crops using a socially and environmentally irresponsible business model. A recent report from Reporter Brasil revealed that, despite Bunge’s acceptance of the Brazil’s National Agreement for the Eradication of Slave Labor, the company continues to buy from Brazilian plantations that employ slave labor. As the largest processor of soy in Brazil, the company is also responsible for the reckless clearing of the Amazon rainforest and adjacent Cerrado to produce the crop. Soy is now the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon.
For more information, visit www.RAN.org
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