Rabobank funding deforestation projects in Brazil: report
Despite its “zero tolerance” policy, Rabobank provided at least 750 loans to farmers in Brazil who have been classified as illegal deforesters by the national environmental authority, Financieele Dagblad reports based on extensive data research done in collaboration with the NGO Reporter Brasil. The farmers funded by Rabobank were punished by environmental authority Ibama for deforesting a total of 84,000 hectares - the same as the area of all industrial estates in the Netherlands, FD reports.
FD gained access to tens of thousands of loans to Brazilian farmers and compared it with a register of environmental violations from the federal environmental authority Ibama.
The newspaper found that 326 different farmers who were imposed an embargo due to illegal deforestation subsequently received a total of 753 loans from Rabobank. Also, contrary to its own policy, Rabobank failed to cut ties with 39 customers who got an administrative sanction for deforestation during the term of a loan. The most recent Rabobank loan to a deforester was in August this year.
According to FD, the most striking case is a farmer featured in a Rabobank promotional video about sustainable soy farming in 2019. Between 2010 and 2019, she and her family deforested 2,760 hectares for soy cultivation - an area as large as half of De Hoge Veluwe National Park. Despite several embargoes in 2020, Rabobank is still doing business with her, the newspaper found.
Rabobank told FD that it couldn’t respond to individual cases but indeed has clients in its portfolio who have received one or more deforestation embargoes. The bank doesn’t consider an embargo from Ibama a conviction but only a suspicion. For Rabobank, such an embargo is a reason to investigate the customer, not to cut ties, according to the newspaper.
Rabobank says it has a “zero tolerance policy” towards deforestation, claiming that its policy is stricter than that of other banks and Brazilian laws and regulations. The bank says it does not accept or retain customers who have been guilty of illegal deforestation after 2005.
