Dear Editor,

After 10,000 protestors demonstrated outside Tesco HQ on Friday, mentioned in the Basingstoke Gazette article ‘Tesco avoids bloody nose from shareholders over pay’ (25/06/2021), calling on the company to drop suppliers linked to JBS. Why is Tesco ignoring over 250,000 people that have called on the company to drop forest destroyers from the supply chain?

Despite public demands and strong opposition from Greenpeace, Tesco continues to buy meat from JBS, the biggest meat company in the world. JBS has criminal convictions for bribery and corruption and has a long history of driving deforestation in the Amazon for profit.

At least 58,000 hectares of rainforest, an area the size of the Isle of Man, were lost to deforestation, the largest ever recorded for the month of April and an increase of 43% compared to 2020.

Scientists have warned that deforestation of this scale could bring the Amazon rainforest to an ecological “tipping point” at which the entire ecosystem collapses, crippling regional economies, causing the loss of many indigenous species and the consequences the decline of the Amazon rainforest would have on global climate affecting all of us.

Tesco has an opportunity to lead the way in genuinely deforestation free foods by dropping forest destroyers and encouraging other supermarkets to follow suit giving the consumers more affordable and sustainable alternatives to intensively farmed meat and dairy. Therefore, contributing to our planet and our future.

Jeannette Schael, Crookham Close, Tadley