Serious approach reflects well on Brazilian leather
03/10/2019
One speaker who commanded particular attention at the ‘Sustainability partnerships in the leather industry: focus on raw material’ on October 2 was Mauricio Bauer, a former JBS executive who is now senior corporate engagement specialist at Washington DC-based campaign group the National Wildlife Fund.
Mr Bauer spoke about a project his organisation has been working on with the leather industry called Deforestation and Conversion Free (DCF) Leather, which has taken on greater significance than ever since some global brands pledged to place no new orders for leather from Brazil following reports of widespread fires to clear land in Amazon regions of Brazil.
He told the audience at the workshop that Brazil’s main tanning industry body, CICB, had engaged closely with the National Wildlife Fund when drawing up the land management and animal welfare components of its Leather Certification of Sustainability (CSCB) programme. He said he believed CICB valued his organisation’s independence; it is independent and funded in part by the Gordon and Better Moore Foundation, an organisation set up in 2000 by the founder of technology company Intel and his wife).
Emphasising this independence, Mr Bauer urged international buyers of leather to pay attention to other regions of Brazil as well as to the Amazon biome. He made a specific reference to the Cerrado, the savanna region that covers more than 2 million square-kilometres in the centre of Brazil. Although large-scale agriculture only began in the Cerrado in the late 1990s, Mauricio Bauer said that half of it has now gone.
Audience members afterwards said that they had found Mr Bauer an impressive speaker. They said, also, that working with him reflected well on the Brazilian leather industry. “It shows that CICB is serious about this,” one delegate said.
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