Day 001 - 28 Jun 94 - Page 55


     
     1
              My Lord, that is not the end of it.  Ever since awareness
     2        of the importance of the world's rainforests became
              general, McDonald's has had a positive policy that no beef
     3        from any recently deforested rainforest area in the world
              should find its way into their products.  This policy
     4        which has been in existence for many years, as Mr. Ray
              Cesca from the parent Corporation will tell your Lordship,
     5        was reduced into writing in 1989. The reference is pink
              bundle XVI/1.
     6
              My Lord, there are two additional small points perhaps
     7        which illustrate the fallacy of the idea that McDonald's
              use of beef even remotely threatens the environment or the
     8        economies of the so-called under-developed or Third World
              countries.  The first is this, it relates do Costa Rica,
     9        that from 1980 to 1991 the amount of beef consumed by
              McDonald's restaurants in Costa Rica (there are now
    10        I think nine of them) averaged 0.2 per cent of that
              country's total annual beef consumption.  I do not have
    11        the precise figures for Guatemala at the moment, but they
              are thought to be similar.
    12
              Second, the defendants, as your Lordship knows, have said
    13        in their defence that McDonald's in Germany uses beef
              fattened on meal from soya beans which is grown on
    14        recently deforested rainforest land in Brazil.  This
              assertion is every bit as false as all the others.
    15
              The evidence of Professor Doktor Hans Schumm (yellow
    16        bundle XIV/46) will show the following.  First, the beef
              from McDonald's in Germany comes almost entirely from
    17        dairy cows which, one would expect, are raised to produce
              milk, butter and cheese but not beef, so that their
    18        eventual use in hamburgers is an accidental bi-product.
 
    19        Second, those dairy cows are fed largely on grass and
              silage.  At most, soya meal forms 1.8 per cent of their
    20        diet.  Half of that 1.8 per cent comes from Argentina and
              half from the USA.  None of it comes from Brazil, nor from
    21        any other country which has rainforests.
 
    22        Last, the soya beans of which that meal is a bi-product
              are, in any case, grown primarily not to feed cattle, but
    23        to produce oil for human consumption.
 
    24        My Lord, I am nearly at an end apart from the video tape
              that I would like to show to your Lordship before I finish
    25        the opening.  There is one other point which I ought to
              mention because it has popped its way into the latest form 
    26        of the leaflet, and that is methane.  It has nothing 
              whatever to do with the rainforests, and, your Lordship 
    27        may think, very little to do with the case.  I have to
              confess that I do not regard it as an entirely serious
    28        point.  However, the defendants rely on it and they put it
              into the latest version of the leaflet which appeared
    29        yesterday.
 
    30        Your Lordship will forgive perhaps certain humour in
              this.  As part of their digestive process cattle produce

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