For products like cacao (above) and palm oil, sustainability is increasingly critical to the corporate bottom line. Bobby Neptune/USAID. By Sarah Alix Mann and Octavia Aris Payne Some companies are learning the hard way that sustainability is increasingly critical to the corporate bottom line—and that advanced technologies make unsustainable and illegal practices easier to detect. The Roundtable on […]

In the previous MAAP #25 and MAAP #26, we illustrated deforestation hotspots in the Peruvian Amazon for the periods 2012-2014 and 2015*, respectively. Here in MAAP #32, we present a complementary analysis based on the size of deforestation events. Graph 32a shows the comparative results of deforestation patterns between 2013 and 2015, indicating that: Small-scale (< 5 hectares) accounted for the vast majority of […]

By Nancy Harris, Octavia Payne and Sarah Mann With the world’s appetite for chocolate at an all-time high, producers are looking for new places to grow cacao—the raw ingredient in cocoa and chocolate. Some are turning to South America, where satellite images show one cacao plantation encroaching dramatically on the Amazon rainforest. Historically, much of […]

By Nancy Harris, Octavia Payne and Sarah Mann With the world’s appetite for chocolate at an all-time high, producers are looking for new places to grow cacao—the raw ingredient in cocoa and chocolate. Some are turning to South America, where satellite images show one cacao plantation encroaching dramatically on the Amazon rainforest. Historically, much of […]

By Octavia Payne and Sarah Alix Mann United Cacao, a publicly-traded, commercial producer of the raw material that goes into chocolate—its symbol on the London Stock Exchange is CHOC—has earned some unwelcome attention recently for its large-scale clearing of trees in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon. Reports about the clearing of over 2,000 hectares […]