Criticisms of Cargill

This article addresses various criticisms of Cargill Inc, a privately held agribusiness multinational giant with operations in 70 countries and its headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. Cargill Inc has been owned by the Cargill family for 154 years. It is the largest privately-owned corporation in the United States,[1] with an annual revenue of $113.5 billion in 2019.[2][3]

Concerns have been raised about Cargill's environmental and human rights record in a number of industries and countries by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and other organizations since at least the early 2000s. As a highly influential company, Cargill has been called upon to reduce negative its negative industrial, environmental, and societal impacts, in hopes that it would set global precedents for similar businesses.[4]

Cargill is one of four "trading giants" known as the ABCD group— ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus that controls over fifty percent of the processing capacity in soybeans in the Brazilian Cerrado, and have heavily invested in storage and ports.[5][6] As the Brazilian Cerrado has been transformed into the world's "soy basket"[5]: 69  Greenpeace, local indigenous groups and other environmental groups say that Cargill has contributed to deforestation of the Amazon forest. Greenpeace protests contributed to Cargill's port being shut down from 2007 to 2012.

In response to an ongoing 2005 lawsuit, that has caught the interest of the Supreme Court and the Trump administration, involving child slave labor in the chocolate industry in the Ivory Coast, Cargill has invested millions into programs such as the Implementation of Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS) in 2019.[7]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Forbes_20070601 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Murphy, Andrea. "America's Largest Private Companies 2019". Forbes. Retrieved May 4, 2020.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Cargill_AR_2019 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference RSPO_Cargill_20100519 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Byerlee_oilcroprevolution_2017 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference bloomberg_20190714 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference Cargill_expand_IC_2019 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).