On Saturday (12 December) members of Extinction Rebellion Wandsworth, wearing chicken headdresses, protested outside Lidl on Tooting High Street.

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'For cluck's sake, stop selling birds fattened on Brazilian soya,' read one placard.

Tesco, Lidl, Asda, McDonald's and Nando's all source chicken fed on soya from Brazil's Cerrado region.

This has been linked to thousands of wildfires and the deforestation of the Cerrado. The soya is supplied by trading giant Cargill, the US's second largest private company.

The Cerrato is a woody tropical savanna that covers an area equal in size to Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.

The trees, shrubs and soil of the Cerrado store the equivalent of 13.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – significantly more than China's annual emissions.

It is home to 1,600 species of birds, reptiles and mammals and 10,000 types of plant, many not seen anywhere else in the world.

The Cerrado has less legal protection than the Amazon, which makes it an easy target for land clearance for farming soya.

Between 50% and 80% of the area has been replaced by cattle ranches and soya farms, making it the world's most rapidly expanding agribusiness frontier and one of the fastest shrinking areas of nature. Scientists say it will be hard, if not impossible, to save Amazonia without conserving the Cerrado.

Extinction Rebellion Wandsworth call on Lidl and the other companies to stop sourcing their chicken feed from Cargill, and to make clear in their product labelling where their chicken feed comes from so consumers can see clearly if it is having a damaging effect on the planet.

'I am sure that consumers will not be happy to know that they are contributing, by buying chicken from these companies, to deforestation in Brazil,' says local resident and Extinction Rebellion member Ben Mango.

This article represents the views of XR Wandsworth and is not endorsed or is the editorial view of Tooting Nub News.

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