Did you know that the gold in your phone, the avocados in your kitchen, and even your morning cup of coffee could be having a negative impact on places and people elsewhere in the world? Read on to see the impact that in-demand products are having on countries around the globe.
Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef and exported 469,000 tonnes of fresh and frozen beef in the first quarter of 2022, an increase of 37 percent compared to the first quarter of 2021. China is the main importer of Brazilian beef, receiving over half of its total exports.
However, the industry is responsible for removing vast swathes of forest: government data revealed that the number of cattle in Acre, a state in the Brazilian Amazon, increased by 8.3% in 2020, bringing the region’s herd size to more than 3.8 million. That’s four times its population of people!
Acre is one of Brazil’s least deforested Amazon states, with around 80% of its forests untouched. Though, with livestock now outnumbering people by a ratio of four, the booming cattle sector is a serious danger to Acre’s lush forests.
And deforestation isn't the only issue. In 2018, an investigation by the Guardian newspaper, Repórter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism uncovered that an illegal farm owned by a Brazilian agribusiness called AgroSB had been supplying cattle to the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS.
In response to the investigation, a JBS spokesperson told the Guardian: "The facts pointed out do not correspond to the standards and processes adopted by the company."
It's not the first time JBS has gotten into trouble over its beef supply; in 2017, the business was fined $7.7 million (£6.4m) for buying cattle from farms that had embargoed areas, including another farm owned by AgroSB.
One of the most valuable substances on earth, diamonds can cause trouble in the countries in which they’re found. Take Zimbabwe, for instance.
In 2001, diamonds were first discovered in Marange, eastern Zimbabwe, leading to a period of trade so violent that the diamonds came to be known as '"blood diamonds'".
In 2003, governments across the world established the Kimberly Process (KP), which was aimed at controlling the export and import of diamonds following the wars in Africa caused by their trade.
However, the KP has recently been critised for failing to consider that Russian-owned diamonds are helping to fund conflict. The KP met in Botswana earlier this year to discuss Russia’s profits from diamond mining and funding its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia holds a 33 percent stake in leading diamond company Alrosa, which accounted for about 30 percent of the world's diamond output last year. Ukraine's ambassador to South Africa, Botswana, and Mozambique, Liubov Abravitova, told Reuters that diamonds of Russian origin were "basically sponsoring the killings" in Ukraine.
"The fact that the KP is unable to even discuss whether it should continue certifying Russian diamonds as conflict-free, reaffirms what we have been denouncing for years: that the world's conflict diamond scheme is no longer fit for purpose," said Michael Yoboue, co-ordinator of the Kimberley Process Civil Society Coalition.
This oil-rich country ultimately fell victim to the resource curse, as its government focused too heavily on oil at the expense of other industries. A global crash in oil prices – falling from a peak of $115 (£88) per barrel in June 2014 to under $35 (£27) in early 2016 – increased inflation in the Venezuelan bolvar, which the government responded to by printing more money. But this only made matters worse.
In 2016, the rate of inflation reached 800% and the government declared a state of emergency. By August 2019, inflation had reached 10,000,000%. While January 2020 saw the country's economy recover a little, the coronavirus pandemic and the global fall in oil prices in February and March of last year put oil-dependent Venezuela in a very difficult position.
This was exacerbated by the US's continued sanctions and the departure of Russian oil company Rosneft, a key partner in the country's oil industry.
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s GDP has plummeted, dropping 35% in 2019, and a further 30% in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic; this downward trend is predicted to continue in 2022. This is a massive blow considering that, until 2014, it had been one of South America’s fastest-growing economies.
This has thrust much of the population into poverty – many people cannot afford food, while at least four million people have fled the country. As the government had focused all its energies on oil, farmers couldn’t obtain the resources they badly needed and the food supply ran short.
President Nicolás Maduro has been blamed for the economic situation in Venezuela. Many have lost weight due to food shortages, which some refer to as the "Maduro Diet".
Global demand for almonds is increasing rapidly. In the 2019/20 season, 1.48 million tonnes were produced, which was a 9.9% increase on the previous year and a 41.7% increase on production seven years before, according to data published by Statista.
America is by far the world’s biggest almond-producing country, providing around 80% of the global total. The vitamin E-rich nut overtook the peanut as the most-eaten nut in the US in 2014, as people reacted to the health benefits of the almond and plant-based diets grew more popular.
Yet the nuts are being grown in areas pinpointed by meteorologists as suffering from "extreme drought" and, with each nut taking a massive 1.1 gallons of water to grow, the problem is worsening.
US farmers are doing all they can to get a hold of water and grow this lucrative crop. This usually involves importing snowmelt from the northern Sierra Nevada, although many farmers are now being cut off from these sources by the state. Instead, they’re resorting to pumping groundwater, which can cause damage to aquifers.
Another knock-on effect of the demand for almonds is the impact it’s having on America’s bees. Most commercial beekeepers in the US rely on sending their hives to pollinate the nut trees because it’s more lucrative than selling honey, but the creatures are dying in record numbers due to exposure to pesticides, parasites, and habitat loss as a result of the burgeoning almond industry.
Not just a bright blue metal, this in-demand material is an essential part of lithium-ion batteries, which we use in phones, tablets, laptops, electric vehicles and more. It is also a key material in semiconductor chips, of which there is currently a global shortage.
Sadly, the materials fuelling the energy-storage movement and the technology revolution come at a human cost. More than 60% of the world’s supply is mined in the so-called "cobalt belt" in the south-eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where children as young as six are forced to work and earn as little as $0.65 (50p) per day.
The issue is widespread, with an estimated 35,000 children working in these conditions, as well as being subjected to the risk of landslides and a lack of protective clothing.
Organisations such as Amnesty International are calling for increased regulation and transparency after publishing a report in 2016 which claimed major car companies, including BMW, Tesla, and General Motors, had failed to carry out due diligence on their cobalt supply chains. In late 2019, a landmark lawsuit was brought against Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla by 14 families of Congolese children who claim they were killed or injured while mining for cobalt for mining company Glencore further down the supply chain. Glencore denies the claims.
Steps are being made in the right direction, though. In November 2020, Swiss commodity trading company Trafigura signed a deal with the DRC government to help develop a formalised, regulated mining sector in the country, following the establishment of Entreprise Générale du Cobalt (General Cobalt Company) in February 2019, which claims it will "eliminate child labour, eliminate labour by pregnant women, and eliminate fraud in this sector," according to state mining company chair Albert Yuma.
The world’s favourite sweet treat has a dark side – and we’re not talking about cocoa content. In the Ivory Coast, which supplies almost a third of cocoa beans for the world’s chocolate market, around 88% of farmers don’t make a living wage, defined by Fairtrade International as at least $2.50 (£1.90) a day. The Covid-19 pandemic also led to a further decrease in farmers' income as cocoa prices dropped. This resulted in farmers striking in 2021.
The crop is often grown in protected areas, with a 2017 investigation by environmental organisation Mighty Earth showing that nearly half of Mont Péko National Park and Marahoué National Park have been lost to cocoa planting since 2000.
Darkest of all, over the years, journalists and other organisations have exposed the widespread use of child labour and, in some cases, slavery on cocoa farms. The majority of child labour has been reported in Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
Extreme poverty in Western Africa results in children working at young ages to support their families. Some children are sold to cocoa farms by human traffickers, while others are sold by relatives, many of whom are unaware of the dangerous working conditions.
In 2021, Nestlé, Cargill, Barry Callebaut, Mars, Olam, Hershey, and Mondelz, some of the world's leading chocolate companies, were named in a lawsuit filed by human rights organisation International Rights Advocates on behalf of eight former child slaves who claimed they were forced into unpaid child labour on farms in Western Africa.
It might sound like an obscure chemical, but phosphate plays an essential role in global food production. The white powder is used in synthetic fertiliser, providing essential nutrients to soils, and 75% of the global supply can be found in Morocco and Western Sahara.
Morocco has asserted sovereignty over Western Sahara since 1975 but the claim isn’t internationally recognised, meaning that it remains a self-governing territory. And phosphate is at the heart of this conflict.
On top of that, the material could present risks to miners’ health. At the moment, there is a lack of studies showing the link between phosphate mining and work-related illnesses. Yet a Greenpeace report states: "Some rock phosphate fertilisers contain small amounts of the heavy metal cadmium," which is "highly toxic to humans."
The report also linked phosphate mining areas to "appreciable quantities of uranium." Both heavy metals are associated with cancer, kidney failure, and bone disease.
Used in everything from margarine to cookies, palm oil is to the food industry what plastic is to the packaging world: incredibly useful and versatile, yet deeply problematic. Global production has been growing steadily for decades, from 15.2 million tonnes in 1995 to 76 million tonnes in 2019, and it’s expected to quadruple again by 2050.
Some 85% of the world’s palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, and while it has helped people earn more, especially in rural communities, there is a dark side.
In these two nations, growth of the crop is linked to slash-and-burn agriculture, in other words, the use of fire to clear land for farming. Since 1973, palm oil has been linked to a fifth of total deforestation in Borneo, an island which Malaysia and Indonesia share, putting endangered species such as orangutans in danger.
The industry is also associated with human rights abuses, including child labour, with children as young as eight allegedly working in palm oil production. In fact, in January 2020, the US banned palm oil imports from Sime Darby, a Malaysian producer, due to allegations of forced labour. And in April of the same year, Sri Lanka also banned palm oil imports and ordered that its own palm plantations be destroyed.
That said, in Malaysia and Indonesia, very little is being done to combat the devastating effects of palm oil production. In fact, Indonesia passed a jobs creation bill, widely referred to as the Omnibus Law, which actually reverses lots of plantation legislation that had been protecting the environment.
Now there is no need to obtain environmental permits and submit risk assessments when starting most new agricultural projects. The new law also means that those who are found not to be protecting the environment and lacking essential firefighting equipment while working will not lose their permit.
The world is going nuts for cashews. In 2020, approximately 846.8 thousand metric tonnes of kernel-basis cashew nuts were consumed globally.
Vietnam is the biggest exporter, yet the trade is mired in alleged human rights abuses. In order to separate cashew nuts from their shells, workers have to use cardol and anarcardic acids, which cause burns when they come into contact with bare skin – and many workers aren’t given gloves.
That wasn't the only major issue with this industry. In 2011, a Human Rights Watch report claimed that workers from drug detention centres were employed at forced labour centres, shelling nuts for six or seven hours a day and being beaten if they refused to work.
However, thanks to pressure from activists, the Vietnamese government reports that cashew processing is no longer taking place at these centres.
Promoted by nutritionists as a balanced, plant-based protein source, demand for quinoa has skyrocketed in the past decade – so much so that 2013 was nicknamed the "International Year of Quinoa" by the UN.
Peru is the biggest producer, and exported around $94.9 million (£77.6m) of the grain in 2021, according to Tridge.
Although the boom provided initial benefits to farmers, the 500% increase in the price of grain between 2005 and 2014 priced locals out of a food they used to rely on.
Due to the demands of the global market, there’s been a big reduction in the number of varieties cultivated, as many people prefer light-coloured, large-grain quinoa.
That means that traditional mixed farming methods, which keep soil fertile, are being axed in favour of more intensive methods, which increase pesticide usage and do away with soil-friendly crop rotation.
The world can’t get enough soy, with demand for the versatile bean increasing 15-fold since the 1950s. While some of it is used for food products such as soy milk and meat substitutes, the majority of the world's soy beans are fed to livestock.
Brazil is the second biggest producer after the US, and even though converting Amazon forest into soy plantations has been illegal since 2006, thanks to an international agreement called the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), other regions in the country, such as the biodiverse Cerrado savannah, are not protected.
More than 6,500 square miles (17,000 square km) of the Brazilian Cerrado had been lost to soy plantations in the space of 11 years, according to a 2018 study by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy.
In November 2020, a joint cross-border investigation revealed that British supermarkets including Tesco, Lidl, and Asda (which was owned by American giant Walmart until October 2020) and fast food outlets such as McDonald's and Nando's have been selling chicken fed on soybeans linked to forest fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Cerrado region.
The soybeans came from US company Cargill, which buys from farmers in the Cerrado region and imports soybeans to the UK to be used as animal feed.
McDonald's has said it is aiming to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains by 2030, while Nando's said it was looking at alternatives to soya and recognised that there was more work to do.
Global demand for Italian fizzy wine is booming, with 627.5 million certified bottles produced in 2021. Yet the drink’s popularity is wreaking havoc on the environment.
According to research by the University of Padua, in northern Italy, the area dedicated to Prosecco vineyards has enlarged by 80% in just five years, while the industry is responsible for 74% of soil erosion in the region.
When hillsides are cleared of their natural vegetation, the soil loses its natural barrier against erosion. Worse still, pesticides and fertilisers from farming can easily run off slopes into waterways.
In 2014, a flash flood in the Veneto region killed four people, which led some to ask whether the effects had been worsened by the clearing of woodland for Prosecco vines.
However, others believe Prosecco can be made sustainably through practises such as planting hedgerows, grassing over bare soil, and planting rows of trees alongside vineyards.
While one of the most valuable materials on the planet commands a high price in jewellery shops, at the other end of the gold supply chain in some places is a murky world of organised crime and environmental destruction.
The problem is most pronounced in Peru, where more than 20% of the gold being mined is produced illegally, according to a report by labour watchdog Verité. Illegal mining operations put around 70,000 indigenous people at risk, threatening rivers with mercury pollution and forests with deforestation.
In fact, gold mining deforestation cleared an estimated 22,390 acres of the Peruvian Amazon in 2018, according to Monitoring of the Amazon Andean Project (MAAP). Last year, NASA released photos taken from space showing 'rivers' of what it said were unregistered gold pits in the Madre de Dios region, which had been revealed by sunlight reflecting on them.
To target illegal miners, Peru launched Operación Mercurio (Operation Mercury) in February 2019, which involved 1,200 police officers and hundreds of army officers raiding the notorious mining city of La Pampa. This led to a dramatic 92% reduction in gold mining deforestation in the area between 2018 and 2019.
In 2020, the Dubai-based gold trader Kaloti came under fire after it was discovered that the company, whose gold has been found in products sold by Amazon, Apple, and General Motors, has been buying gold from criminal networks. Kaloti had been involved in a scheme that allowed criminals all over the world to use unlawfully obtained cash to buy scrap gold and sell it to them.
Concrete is the foundation of our cities and the second most widely-used material on Earth. Yet cement – its key ingredient – has devastating impacts not only on the regions where it’s produced but on the wider world, contributing to 8% of global CO2 emissions.
China is by far the biggest producer, churning out an estimated 1.6 billion metric tonnes per year on average.
The process of manufacturing such copious amounts of cement might be impacting people’s health. According to the Health Effects Institute, millions of people in China die prematurely from air pollution every year.
Furthermore, dredging sand from the bottom of rivers for cement production has also made floods more likely, worsening environmental issues.
We’ve developed a global love affair for all things coconut, which has put pressure on countries growing the crop to keep up with demand. The popular fruit is used in everything from dairy-free alternatives to ready-to-eat foods, with Indonesia, the Philippines and India being the three biggest producers respectively.
Yet in the Philippines, around 40-60% of the 3.5 million coconut farmers live on less than $1 (76p) a day, according to a spokesperson from Fair Trade USA quoted in the Guardian in 2017.
As with many other food products that have seen a sudden spike in demand, monoculture farming is becoming an issue, with native plants and biodiversity being stripped to make way for coconuts. Coconut trees grown in the Philippines have far lower yields than those in other countries, giving 46 nuts per tree per year, compared with India’s average of 250 nuts, Mexico's 300 nuts and Brazil's 400 nuts per tree.
It’s thought that by improving agricultural productivity, the industry will become more profitable and farmers’ wages could increase.
This precious metal is used for far more than just jewellery – it can be found in everything from batteries to solar panels and nuclear reactors.
Guatemala is home to one of the world’s largest-known silver deposits, yet the industry there has become infamous for its clashes with indigenous people and human rights abuses.
The Canadian-owned Escobal mine, located in southern Guatemala, is at the heart of the conflict. The mine was acquired by Canadian Tahoe Resources in 2010 and was also granted a licence to build a mine in San Rafael las Flores three years later, despite community opposition to the destructive project.
Since then, protesters have led demonstrations against the mine, which extracted more than $350 million (£270m) worth of silver in 2016. Shockingly, eight protesters at the Escobal mine, and a further 41 at other protests, have reportedly been killed by hitmen; the killers have been prosecuted, but those who hired them have not been found.
Mining at Escobal has been halted since 2017 following the protests, and it will not restart until a court-ordered consultation on the mine’s impact on indigenous communities is completed. The consultation process is expected to continue until 2023.
Eating too much of the white stuff isn’t just bad for us; it also impacts the planet. According to a 2004 report by the WWF, sugar may be responsible for more biodiversity loss globally than any other crop.
Not only are we adding more of it to foods, sugarcane is also being used to extract ethanol to produce biofuels, with global ethanol demand expected to achieve an annual growth rate of 6% by 2023.
This affects areas such as Florida’s Everglades, which have suffered monumental damage due to sugar plantations.
The Everglades is a biologically-rich wetlands in the southern tip of Florida and the top sugar-producing region in the US. Fertilisers used in the sugar industry create a build-up of phosphorous in the environment, which disrupts the ecosystem by killing off native species such as sawgrass and contributing to algae blooms.
What’s more, sugar farming disrupts the Everglades’ natural water balance, creating issues for biodiversity.
Environmental groups including Rainforest Action Network and Wetlands International say that the APP mill is using trees grown on drained peatlands. The draining of carbon-rich peatland releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and makes the lands more vulnerable to fires.
APP said in a statement that it was adhering to its conservation policies, which meant there would be "no new development on peatland since February 2013 as well as the implementation of responsible, peatland best management practice".
There is a bright side though, as rising numbers of producers and buyers of wood pulp have embraced zero-deforestation commitments in recent years, and this has contributed to a fall in forest-clearing in Indonesia, according to supply chain transparency initiative Trase.
Across the world, the avocado has become a brunch staple to rival bacon and eggs, favoured for its health benefits and vibrant green colour. Yet our favourite green fruit is a double-edged sword for Mexico.
The world’s biggest avocado-producing country, Mexico exports billions of dollars-worth of avocados every year and it is creating immense riches for Mexicans, but the fruit is also at the heart of violent and brutal conflict as organised crime groups look to make the most of the "green gold".
In fact, avocados were labelled a “conflict commodity” in Mexico by risk analytics organisation Verisk Maplecroft in a 2019 report.
In Michoacán, Mexico’s biggest growing region, which was forecasted to produce more than 1.7 million tonnes of avocado in 2019/20, criminal drug cartels have turned to extorting and cultivating the fruit.
This has led to a spike in murder and violent theft, as well as human rights abuses including forced and child labour.
What’s more, the industry is linked to illegal deforestation “as criminal groups clear protected woodlands to make room for their avocado groves”, says the Verisk Maplecroft report.
Globally, we drink more than two billion cups of coffee per day – yet the world’s favourite hot beverage comes with some unwelcome consequences.
In coffee-producing nations such as Colombia, farmers are vulnerable to fluctuations in price, which can impact how much they’re paid. The price of coffee on the New York Stock Exchange plummeted from $1.55 (£1.18) per pound (454g) at the end of 2016 to less than $1 (£0.77) per pound in September 2018. This led Brazil and Colombia, the world’s two biggest producers, to publish a joint statement declaring that farmers were being forced to sell their coffee at far below cost price.
However, the lack of pickers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia contributed to a coffee shortage, while droughts in Brazil have also greatly impacted production capacity and as a result the price of coffee has started to climb.
What’s more, it’s destroying the natural environment. In Colombia, many farmers have turned to “reduced-shade” cultivation, which involves removing trees to increase the productivity of plots by as much as five times.
Reduced-shade cultivation accounts for almost 70% of Colombia’s total coffee-producing land, and 40% in Costa Rica, but the process results in a loss of biodiversity, as the trees under which coffee used to be grown represented a haven for plant and animal species. It’s also more water-intensive than shade-growing systems.
Global electric car sales doubled in 2021, reaching 6.6 million. Electric vehicles are heralded as the environmentally-friendly alternative to petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars, but one crucial material that goes into their batteries, and all batteries in fact, is destroying parts of South America.
One electric car battery requires 10kg of lithium, and as Argentina has the world’s largest reserves of the metal, growing demand is proving problematic for the country’s indigenous population.
Producing lithium is a water-intensive process, as brine is pumped beneath the salt flats into evaporation pools, and lithium carbonate is the resulting product. The substance is then shipped off to countries such as China, Japan and the United States, where it’s refined into lithium ion for use in manufacturing.
South America’s lithium triangle, made up of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, is one of the driest places on Earth, and so higher demand for lithium is depriving locals of the water resources they need to survive, particularly as the livelihoods of many depend on agriculture. In Argentina, it’s common for companies to announce lithium explorations without obtaining prior and informed consent from local people, which has resulted in civil society movements coming together to petition for the rights to their water and land in line with their cultural traditions.
Legal cases are currently pending at both a national and international level over government and company failings to respect indigenous people, and the situation is only set to worsen as demand for lithium batteries continues to skyrocket.
One more for the future, more than now, but in recent years, interest in space travel has dramatically increased. While government agencies such as America's NASA and China's National Space Administration have reignited plans to travel to the moon and create new space stations, commercial businesses want to make money from space tourism.
These include Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which saw a manned mission successfully reach space on 11 July, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which flew to space in July, and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
However, while Musk has stated that his interest in space travel comes from a desire to protect the future of humanity through the colonisation of planets such as Mars, space travel itself could eventually become part of the problem here on Earth...
The rockets that launch these space missions use lots of fuels such as kerosene or liquid hydrogen, which in turn release gases that affect the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide. And while the airline industry currently emits more than the space tourism industry, as the sector grows, so will its emissions.
And at a potentially alarming rate too, as one rocket launch carrying around four passengers can emit up to 300 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which will stay in the upper atmosphere for years.
In comparison, a long-haul flight is said to emit one to three tonnes of carbon dioxide per passenger, according to Eloise Marais, associate professor of physical geography at University College London, as reported by the Guardian.
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