whalley_range_11102020_11617

Manchester Greenpeace stage ‘rebrand’ protest outside Tesco in Whalley Range and Market Street over link to deforestation

  • Greenpeace 'rebrand' Tesco with posters at branches in Whalley Range and Market Street
  • Tesco linked to the meat supplier JBS 
  • Supermarket's pledge to end links by 2020 extended to 2025 

Greenpeace activists have rebranded windows outside branches of Tesco in Whalley Range and Market Street because of the retailer’s links with JBS, a meat production company linked to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

The Manchester stores were part of a nationwide protest to get Britain’s biggest retailer to keep to the pledge of ending their links with JBS.

Greenpeace has previously demonstrated outside the Tesco headquarters in Welwyn Garden City and at stores in Cambridge, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

The posters call on the Tesco CEO, Ken Murphy, to ‘Stop selling meat linked to forest destruction”. In addition, a petition has been set up which hopes to gain 200,000 signatures to see them pledge to end these links by 2025.  

JBS was recently fined $280m by the US government for bribery of Brazilian officials in the Amazon region in a landmark case.    

Martin Porter is a long-serving Manchester-based Greenpeace member.

He said: “Our campaign against JBS has been going for about eight years, when a Greenpeace investigation found that JBS had been selling meat to food companies.

“Tesco and various companies said, by 2020, that they would stop selling meat linked to the destruction and that hasn’t happened, were looking to see if Tesco will keep to the new pledge and end it by 2025.”

He added: “If things carry on as they are for the next 20 years, the [Amazon] rainforest will become totally unsustainable and will have severe consequences.

“What is driving this is our current unsustainable meat consumption.”

The issue of using animal feed on cleared land in Brazil featured on the recent Sir David Attenborough documentary, Extinction: The Facts.

A Tesco’s spokesperson said: “We share Greenpeace’s aim to end deforestation in the Amazon.

“It’s why we’ve set challenging public targets committing to zero deforestation. We support action to ensure all food sold in the UK is deforestation-free.”