Three Towers Flooring Inc. is firmly committed to preserving Brazil’s rain forest and renewing its natural resources. Strictly monitored by the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Natural Resources (IBAMA), Three Towers promotes sustainable forest practices, securing timber that is selectively harvested and inspected under government guidelines. Coupled with a stringent policy of reforestation, rational harvesting from sustainable forests assures the health and continuity of this most valuable resource.

Three Towers Flooring manufacturers hardwood flooring only from timber that is selectively harvested under the principles of sustainable forest management. Each tree is assessed for age and condition. Older trees, often susceptible to disease, are removed first, assuring that valuable resources are not left to waste away on the forest floor. After timber is harvested, multiple trees are replanted fostering sustainable forest practices and completing the reforestation process.

In the final analysis, the process of selective timber harvesting produces the highest quality lumber, allowing immature trees in the upper-story to benefit from increased sunlight and water. And because of the tropical climate, reforestation in Brazil’s rain forest occurs substantially faster than in temperate climates of North America.

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Furthermore, according to the WWF, NOT a lumber or forestry organization, lumber and logging account for only 3% of deforestation of the rain forest compared to 60% for cattle ranching and 33% for subsistance farming. Add to that, with biofuel production the price of corn has skyrocketed along with soybeans. Following are some articles courtesy of respected environmental journals that outline specific concern for the cattle and soybean industries:

McAmazon

06 April 2006

Greenpeace activists occupy an area in 1,645 hectares of the Amazon that has been illegally deforested.

International — It is a globally known symbol: the golden arches can be seen in many countries around the world. But whatever the fast food giant wants you to believe the golden arches stand for, McDonald's today stands for rainforest destruction. And that is one very 'Unhappy Meal' for the planet.

The Amazon rainforest needs no introduction; the mere mention of its name conjures up images of a huge untouched wilderness bursting with amazing life. But to McDonald's and a handful of huge soya traders, the Amazon means something completely different. It means cheap land and cheap labour. Cheap land because it is often stolen, cheap labour because some of the people who work cutting down the forest or work on the farms in the Amazon are actually slaves. You heard it right, slaves.

UPDATE, JULY 25, 2006: Thanks to enormous pressure from the thousands of emails and letters sent to their European headquarters by you, our supporters, McDonald's has agreed to stop selling chicken fed on soya grown in newly deforested areas of the Amazon rainforest.

'How is this possible,' you ask? Well it goes something like this.

The soya traders encourage farmers to cut down the rainforest and plant massive soya monocultures. The traders take the soya and ship it to Europe where it is fed to animals like chickens and pigs. The animals are then turned into fast food products like McDonald's McNuggets and many other products found in fast food outlets and supermarkets.


The journey from rainforest to restaurant might sound simple enough but it has taken a year-long investigation using satellite images, aerial surveillance, previously unreleased government documents and on-the-ground monitoring to expose. What we found was a global trade in soya from rainforest destruction in the Amazon to McDonald's fast food outlets and supermarkets across Europe.


Most of the global trade in soya is controlled by a small number of massive traders: Cargill, Bunge and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). In Brazil, this cartel plays the role of bank to the farmers. Instead of providing loans they give farmers seed, fertiliser and herbicides in return for soya at harvest: Bunge alone provided the equivalent of nearly US$1 billion worth of seed, fertiliser and herbicides to Brazilian farmers in 2004.

This gives the companies indirect control over huge areas of land that used to be rainforest. Together, these three companies are responsible for around 60 percent of the total financing of soya production in Brazil.

The state of Mato Grosso is Brazil's worst in terms of deforestation and forest fires, accounting for nearly half of all the deforestation in the Amazon in 2003-04. In Mato Grosso, the governor, Blairo Maggi, is known locally as the 'Soya King'. His own massive soya company Grupo Andre Maggi controls much of the soya production in the state and since his election in 2002, forest destruction in Mato Grosso has increased by 30 percent.


Banks too have been caught up in the destruction of the Amazon. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private lending arm of the World Bank, wrongly assessed a loan to Grupo Andre Maggi as being of 'low environmental risk,' despite evidence to the contrary. Other banks have also lent huge sums of money to the company without conducting their own environmental or social impact audits.

So far, Rabobank, the Netherlands' biggest agricultural bank has lent over US$330 million to Grupo Andre Maggi. Rabobank admitted that it didn't do its own assessment of the risk of the loans, simply accepting the (flawed) assessment of the IFC.

So fast food and supermarkets, soya traders and big banks are all trashing the Amazon rainforest.

If we can track soya beans more than 7,000km (4,400 miles) from farms in the Amazon to chicken products in Europe, there is no excuse for the food industry not to know where their feed comes from, and to demand the exclusion of Amazon soya from their supply chain.

Greenpeace members protest Cargill facility in Brazil

Protesters with environmentalist group Greenpeace scaled a Cargill Inc. soybean export facility in Brazil and used a boat to block access to the loading dock, a Cargill spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

Greenpeace reported in a statement Friday morning that Cargill employees were responding with violence and injuries were being reported. The group also said Cargill ships were ramming the Greenpeace ship.

Greenpeace has protested the Cargill facility, claiming that commercial agriculture efforts are ruining Amazon rainforest.

Cargill spokeswoman Lori Johnson said a handful of demonstrators "illegally invaded" the grain export facility, which was built in 2003, at about 8:45 a.m. local time in Santarem, Brazil. Officials from Minnetonka-based Cargill called authorities in Santarem once they learned about the situation, Johnson said.

But Johnson said no Cargill employees were inciting violence and there were no Cargill boats ramming the Greenpeace ship, although she said locals who oppose the group may have used their own boats to get to and board the Greenpeace vessel, she said.

"We believe we acted appropriately by calling the authorities," Johnson said. "While we disagree with illegal trespassing and defacing of property, we don't condone violence against people who do that."

Authorities arrived on the scene almost immediately and arrested the protesters, she said.

Greenpeace staged a similar demonstration May 1, 2004, at the same facility.

Cargill, a private company, operates 13 soybean silos near the Amazon rainforest. The company has worked with Greenpeace before to stop buying soy from farmers linked to land grabbing, slave labor or massive deforestation practices.

"We agree that the Amazon is internationally significant and it needs to be preserved," Johnson said. "Where we diverge is how you achieve those things, and we think its extreme to prohibit commercial agriculture. Soybean production provides an important economic foundation in the area."

Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Since 1990, the number of cattle in the Amazon has more than doubled from 26 million to 57 million in 2002.

The rise in production has been driven by a huge rise in beef exports - combined with a revaluation of the Brazilian currency, the Real, which made cattle ranching more profitable for farmers and encouraged them to deforest.

The graph below shows how deforestation rose as beef and hardwood exports increased until 2004.

Since then the government has achieved some success in reducing the amount of forest being cleared, through controlling illegal logging, more land inspections and creating conservation areas.

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