Can a fast food company save the Amazon?

Last year Greenpeace and eight other NGOs in Brazil launched a zero-deforestation proposal, aimed at ending deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon by 2015. They proposed the establishment of a fund, to speed up Brazil’s initiatives to fight deforestation and promote sustainable forest use. Taking up the NGOs’ proposal, on August 1, 2008 the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree creating a new Amazon Fund, intended to raise US$1 billion in its first year. The fund’s first donation, US$100 million, came from Norway.

This initiative now needs to be replicated on a global level, so that the forests of Indonesia, the Congo Basin and elsewhere, can be protected too.

For McDonald's working with a group like Greenpeace was unusual but not unprecedented. The company has joined with a variety of environmental and animal welfare groups over the years on issues including the company's packaging, the use of environmentally harmful refrigerants and treatment of farm animals. Creating a responsible supply chain is part of the corporate culture, its officials say, though it clearly is also good public relations.

Joint efforts between nonprofit groups and major corporations have become increasingly important and sophisticated and this could be an important model for attacking very complicated social and environmental problems in the future.

Corporations now need to take the next step in their effort to ensure that making a profit does not cost the earth by exerting their influence to change public policy. In Brazil the pressure exerted by McDonalds and the coalition of soya customers enabled the Brazilian government to put forward the zero-deforestation proposal. This would not have happened unless corporations had argued that they could not continue to buy soya from Brazil if this meant the demise of the Amazon. More corporations need to embrace the challenge of running business in a sustainable manner and shed the old habit of remaining quiet, or worse, to work openly or behind the scenes to weaken legislation, question science and put profit ahead of the survival of the planet.