Embedded Deforestation: The Case Study of the Brazilian–Italian Bovine Leather Trade

Abstract

Deforestation and forest degradation driven by Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) are important sources of carbon emissions. Market globalization and trade liberalization policies reinforce this trend and risk deforestation to be embedded in global value chains. Due to the complexity of global production and trade systems, deforestation risk is also embedded in the supply chains of the products and sectors that are not direct deforestation drivers. Bovine leather is a commodity closely entangled in the debates about deforestation as it is a by-product of cattle. This research focuses on leather trade between Brazil and Italy to demonstrate the channels through which Italian imports of Brazilian leather could possess embedded Amazonian deforestation and related risks. The data employed for the analysis was searched at three different levels for the leather trade between Brazil and Italy: (a) the country level annual leather trade statistics for the years 2014–2018 taken from the Comtrade database; (b) the state level leather trade data, for the years 2014–2018 taken from the Comexstat database; and (c) the exporter–importer level leather trade data for the period of August 2017–August 2018, based on customs declarations. The analysis helps to demonstrate that the Italian leather trade with Brazil possesses the risk of deforestation unless the proper traceability and due diligence systems are in place to claim the opposite. The European and Italian leather industry need to be more proactive in acknowledging the existence of the risk at different levels, putting full traceability systems in place and sending out clear market signals that deforestation is not tolerated, and that sustainability is valued.

Deforestation as a Systemic Risk: The Case of Brazilian Bovine Leather

“…Depending on the granularity of the analysis, i.e., whether the national, state, municipality or importer-exporter level data are analyzed, the visibility of deforestation risk can differ. An elaborate discussion on deforestation risk traced in exported bovine leather from Brazil to Italy can be found Mammadova et al [119].…”

Green Assessment of Imports and Exports of Wooden Forest Products Based on Forest Processing Industry: A Case Study of China

“…PTT represents the amount of pollution contained in the export value of unit currency and the value of unit currency. The ratio of the pollution amount contained in the import value is the ratio of the export pollution trade factor to the import pollution trade factor, which is called the trade pollution condition [43].…”

“…TP [28] and WGTC [2,40] indexes were adopted for the perspectives of environmental trade competitiveness. PTT [41][42][43] and UPC [6] indexes were adopted for the perspectives of pollution treatment. The above indicators are described in Section 2.1.…”

Large-Scale Collective Action to Avoid an Amazon Tipping Point – Key Actors and Interventions

“…The Amazon would grow to prominence as the Earth's most emblematic terrestrial biome, yet this has not meant widespread global concern for its conservation beyond some more affluent Western countries. Globally, key consumer regions of commodities produced at the cost of Amazon deforestation (e.g., leather in Italy, beef in China or the Middle East) remain rather aloof and unresponsive (see, e.g., Mammadova et al, 2020), while locally, land use has been primarily guided by Euro-American modernist ambitions (Hecht, 2011) that only recently encountered significant political opposition from alternative views, such as Sumak Kawsay and buen vivir. These indigenous or indigenous-based alternative framings embrace Amazon conservation at heart, questioning Western notions of development (Coq-Huelva et al, 2018).…”