From: Greenpeace
Food manufacturer Princes are 'big in corned beef' - that food cupboard staple with a use-by date sometime in the next millennia. In 2007, they were the third largest canned food supplier to the UK.
We've come across Prince's in the past because they sell a lot of canned tuna, but they also sell a lot of corned beef. With all of the Amazon cattle work we've been doing lately we've developed a keen interest in where they get it from, and tins of Princes corned beef are rapidly multiplying around the forest campaign team's office space.
Princes have previous form over dodgy sustainability standards. Last year, along with John West, they came bottom in a league table evaluating the environmental credentials of tinned tuna - mostly as a result of them depending on large-scale fishing methods which also kill lots of non-target species like sharks and turtles. So when we saw that that on cans of Princes corned beef it now says: "Princes Brazilian beef is sourced from long established ranch areas and not cleared Equatorial Rain Forest regions," we were, naturally, intrigued.
We were particularly interested because, as the Slaughtering the Amazon report showed, Princes is buying beef from JBS - one of the big three Brazilian cattle companies that we identified as key players in driving rainforest destruction. In 2008, Princes put 8,000 tonnes of JBS beef into cans, and sold it to the British public.
It gets even more interesting because at the moment, JBS is the villain of the Amazon beef campaign. As a result of our work the other two big beef companies - Marfrig and Bertin - have both agreed to stop buying beef from ranches implicated in rainforest destruction. But JBS has done nothing.
While Princes may think that the beef they're buying doesn't come from deforested areas, they're buying from a company that continues to get cattle from illegally deforested areas of the Amazon. That calls into question Princes' claim to be environmentally sustainable.
From our experience with soya, we know that moratoria - where companies agree to not buy products that have helped drive deforestation - make a real difference in stopping it happening. If companies buying beef and leather from Brazil want to be doing the right thing, they need to be supporting a moratorium.
Nike, Timberland, Clarks, Bertin, Marfrig - there's now a long list of companies that have agreed to do so. They've engaged with the problem and done something about it. Why is it so hard for Princes? If they care enough about the rainforest it to put it on their cans, we'd expect them to want to make sure they get this one right.
So where do we go from here? Well it's true, there are sexier issues to campaign on than corned beef, but I guess we're asking ourselves whether the time has come to dress up as cans of the great sandwich staple, and take to the streets. Greenpeace does corned beef? More great moments in forests campaigning? Bring it on...