There’s one industry that destroys more forests than any other — beef.
Forests around the world are cleared to make way for cattle destined for your dinner plate.
And Australia is no different.
More than half the continent is used for grazing livestock. And most deforestation happens on Australian cattle farms.
Now, there is a global push to end deforestation through regulation, consumer action and corporate accountability.
And supermarkets are being singled out, urged to stop selling beef from properties that clear forest.
The beef industry is pushing back, and one of its weapons is the dictionary. It says clearing forests on cattle properties shouldn’t always count as deforestation.
The Australian Conservation Foundation, which is pressuring supermarkets to change their policy in Australia, has examined hundreds of instances of deforestation in Australia.
It has compiled a list of 50 properties that have cleared significant areas of forest in the past few years that all meet two key criteria: data suggests all of them contain habitat of protected species or ecological communities, and all of them are linked to the domestic beef industry.
The list reveals what deforestation for beef looks like across the country.
In 2023, this property in New South Wales finished clearing 1,500 hectares of forest.
That’s about the size of half a dozen or so inner-city suburbs in Sydney.
According to government data, those trees were likely home to koalas, which are now listed as endangered in NSW, as well as many other threatened and endangered species.
A similar area of 1,760 hectares was cleared on this property in NSW in 2022. This lost habitat was thought to be home to a range of protected species including pink cockatoos, which are listed as endangered across the country.
All 50 of the properties on the list each cleared more than 14 hectares of forest since 2020. Most of them cleared more than 100 hectares.
Across those areas, there are records of hundreds of federally listed threatened species and ecological communities.
Together they amount to 16,000 hectares cleared — the equivalent of 8,000 MCGs.
The Australian Conservation Foundation says it’s confirmed all of the clearing is happening on beef properties that supply the domestic market.
Australia is the only rich country listed as a “deforestation hotspot” by the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature.
The conservation group estimated 43 million hectares of forest had been destroyed — about six times the area of Tasmania — between 2004 and 2017.
“It’s very bad and people don’t even know it’s happening,” says Dr Martin Taylor, an environmental scientist from the University of Queensland, who has worked extensively with WWF and other conservation groups.
He says it’s clear what’s driving that deforestation — beef.
Professor Martine Maron from the University of Queensland says there’s no doubt most forest in Australia is cleared from cattle farms.
But she says blaming beef might be too simplistic given government policies, bank policies and concerns about land value all incentivise clearing on cattle properties.
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) is hoping to change some of those incentives.
They are calling on Coles and Woolworths — which together sell about a third of all beef in Australia — to guarantee they won’t sell beef from properties that have cleared forest, like the 50 properties shown above.
“Woolworths and Coles are two of the biggest buyers of Australian beef,” says Bonnie Graham, ACF’s corporate campaigner.
“And with that size comes a huge amount of influence.”
The demand doesn’t seem radical, when you consider what’s happening globally.
The big supermarkets’ smaller competitor in Australia, Aldi, has said all its beef will be deforestation free by the end of 2025.
Internationally, so has UK’s biggest supermarket chain Tesco as well as its competitors Sainsbury, Waitrose, Co-op and Marks and Spencer. So has the global arm of Aldi.
The EU has even announced it won’t allow beef imports after this year unless they can be proven to be deforestation free. And that follows a cohort of European supermarkets refusing to buy any beef from Brazil due to concerns about land clearing in the Amazon Basin.
In Brazil, more than 30 million hectares of rainforest — an area bigger than the state of Victoria — has been cleared in the past 20 years. It’s thought up to 80 per cent of that destruction was for cattle.
Chris Parker, the CEO of Cattle Australia, which represents grass-fed beef producers in Australia insists there is no deforestation problem here, and he questions the motives of those who campaign against land clearing.
“Often their business model relies on outrage. And for outrage, you need an enemy, and they see the beef industry as that enemy,” he says.
Asked about deforestation visible on cattle properties, like the 50 that ACF have identified, Dr Parker says he wants to see proof that it’s contributing to environmental problems.
“Is it regrowth? Is it land that was already cleared previously? These are not simple black and white answers. They are about getting appropriate empirical data,” he says.
Dr Parker points to national data. Australia’s State of the Forests report in 2023 does show that total forest cover in Australia has been increasing every year since 2007.
So how can there be a deforestation problem, if total forest area is increasing?
Dr Taylor says that data is in conflict with other national data sets that suggest forest cover is decreasing. But regardless, he says measures of total forest cover are “ecologically meaningless”.
He says that’s because it equates the cutting down of forests — which could be decades or more old — with young trees, which have grown just enough to cross the threshold for being defined a “forest”.
A forest in Australia is usually defined as an area of a particular size, which is tall enough and dense enough. Specifically: at least a fifth of a hectare, with trees at least 2 metres high, and a canopy covering at least 20 per cent of the area.
Cattle Australia would like to add some caveats to that definition if the forest is on agricultural land.
“We’re not saying that you go out and clear virgin forest. We’ve never said that,” Dr Parker says.
But it argues any land that was significantly altered after 1990 shouldn’t count as forest.
That would mean excluding forest that was weeded 34 years ago, or forest that had infrastructure like a dam or shed built in it.
Cattle Australia says clearing such land should not count as deforestation and therefore any future labels or rules about deforestation used by supermarkets or regulators must exclude large sections of forest land on cattle properties.
Professor Maron disagrees.
“I think it’s really important that the definition of deforestation aligns with the practice that we have a concern about — the loss of forest — rather than some sort of legal technicality,” she says.
Dr Taylor is more blunt.
“The only acceptable definition to an ecologist like me is if there is a native forest one day and the next day there isn’t. That should be the end of the story on deforestation,” he says.
For conservation group ACF, a definition like that being proposed by Cattle Australia would amount to greenwashing.
“Any policy that allows deforestation or broadscale land clearing to continue to occur under the guise of a deforestation-free policy is quite simply greenwashing,” says Bonnie Graham, who campaigns on sustainable supply chains for ACF.
So far neither Coles nor Woolworths have set targets acceptable to ACF.
Woolworths has a target of “net-zero deforestation” by 2025, which allows deforestation, but tries to offset that with regrown forests.
“We are committed to sourcing beef sustainably in partnership with our farmers and suppliers,” a spokesperson said.
Coles doesn’t have any target around deforestation in its beef supply chain but told the ABC it was committed to reducing its impact on the environment and to helping customers make more responsible choices.
In the end, Professor Maron says, among all the environmental problems we face, deforestation is one we should be able to fix.
“From a biodiversity perspective habitat loss, largely through deforestation, is the most important threat…to our biodiversity at the moment. And the thing is, it’s one of the few threats that we actually have complete leverage over as humans. We do it, or we do not do it. We permit it to happen, or we do not.”
Reporting: Michael Slezak
Development: Katia Shatoba
Design: Brody Smith
Mapping, production: Mark Doman
Satellite imagery sourced from the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2.
Posted , updated
