For many years, the world’s attention has been fixed on the terrible crimes against people and planet being ravaged in the forests of the Brazilian Amazon, to supply beef and soy.
There is a growing awareness of the need to address the impacts on the Amazon of what we eat. But similar destruction in another crucial biodiversity hotspot in South America, driven by a very different commodity, has gone largely unnoticed. South of the Amazon lies the vast Cerrado, one of the richest biomes on Earth, home to 161 species of mammal, including giant anteaters, giant armadillos, jaguars and tapir. Millions of people are also dependent on its forests and savannahs for their livelihoods. Yet the destruction being wrought in the Cerrado by industrial agriculture in recent decades has been even worse than that seen in the wet, dense forest to the north. About half of the biome’s native vegetation has already been lost, mostly to make way for agribusiness expansion. And while the latest news from the Amazon is cautiously positive, in the Cerrado the opposite is true.
The problem is getting worse, not better: in 2023 rates of deforestation in the biome increased by 43 per cent compared to the previous year Earthsight’s year-long investigation reveals that corporations and consumers in Europe and North America are driving this destruction in a new way. Not by what they eat – but what they wear. Earthsight has discovered that cotton used by fast fashion behemoths H&M and Zara is linked to large-scale deforestation, land grabbing, human rights abuses and violent land conflicts in the Brazilian Cerrado.
H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara, are the world’s largest clothing companies. They had combined profits of around US$41 billion in 2022. H&M has 4,400 shops around the world while Zara and other Inditex brands – Pull&Bear, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius – have nearly 6,000. H&M and Zara are global leaders in the fast fashion industry, churning out numerous clothing collections each year.
Over the last decade Brazilian cotton has gained prominence in the global fashion market. The country is now the world’s second largest exporter and expected to overtake the US as the number one cotton supplier by 2030. In the decade to 2023, Brazil’s exports more than doubled. Almost all this cotton is grown in the Cerrado.
But H&M and Zara do not buy this cotton directly. Like most Western fashion giants, they source their clothes largely from suppliers based in Asia. These companies transform raw cotton into the finished goods we find at clothing shops. By trawling through thousands of shipment records, our investigators found that H&M and Zara’s suppliers source cotton grown in the western portion of the Brazilian state of Bahia by two of the country’s largest producers: SLC Agrícola and Grupo Horita (Horita Group).
SLC and Horita’s cotton production in western Bahia – a part of the Cerrado biome that has been heavily impacted by industrial-scale agribusiness – is linked to a number of illegalities.