French ‘Amazon leather’ report lacks accuracy
08/02/2013
The group, Envol Vert, issued a statement during the January sales in France urging footwear brands and retail groups there to guarantee that the leather in their shoes has no links to deforestation. Its press release offered no source for the one-in-seven statistic and no explanation as to how the figure could be so high.
In another part of the statement, Envol Vert also made the claim that 88% of Brazil’s cattle herd is on land in Amazon regions. This percentage contradicts official figures from Brazil’s official statistics agency, IBGE.
An official IBGE report for 2011 said that Brazil has a national herd of more than 120 million head of cattle. Of the four states with the largest number of cattle, only one Mato Grosso, is officially an Amazon state. Brazil’s territory in the Amazon Basin encompasses seven states in the northern part of the country (Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins), most of the state of Maranhão in the north-east, and Mato Grosso, which is in the centre-west region of the country.
There are cattle ranches in all Brazilian states, but apart from Mato Grosso, which had a 13.8% share of the 2011 total, the largest cattle populations are in the non-Amazon states of Minas Gerais with 11.2%, Goiás with 10.2% and Mato Grosso do Sul with 10.1%. This suggests that Envol Vert’s report is lacking in accuracy.
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