Four major French banking groups are being accused by environmental NGOs of indirectly financing deforestation in the Amazon through their support for global soy traders.
Reclaim Finance and Canopée say BNP Paribas, BPCE, Crédit Agricole and Société Générale have provided financing to two large soy wholesalers, including US agribusiness giant Cargill, which are alleged to source from farmers involved in clearing forest in Brazil.
Bunge and Cargill, two US titans of the agri-food sector, together recorded turnover of 200 billion dollars in 2024.
Using satellite-based land-use data from the MapBiomas network, which monitors deforestation, the NGOs compared areas of forest loss in the Amazon with the registered locations of Bunge and Cargill storage facilities in Brazilian land registries.
They say that in 273 cases, storage sites were located less than 50 kilometres from crops on land cleared of forest, suggesting both companies are likely buying from those farms.
According to Reclaim Finance, between January 2024 and August 2025 BNP Paribas, BPCE, Crédit Agricole and Société Générale together took part in three transactions with Bunge, in the form of loans or bond issues, worth a total of 4.3 billion dollars.
BNP Paribas also granted a 1.5 billion dollar loan to Cargill in October 2024, while Société Générale participated in a 3.2 billion dollar loan to Bunge in March 2024, the NGOs say.
In comments to Agence France-Presse, BNP Paribas said its clients must have implemented a “zero deforestation” policy by the end of 2025. “Our clients’ compliance with this policy will be assessed during 2026,” the bank added. Bunge and Cargill have also pledged to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains by the end of 2025.
Société Générale said its anti-deforestation policy includes specific exclusion criteria for clients operating in South American value chains. Crédit Agricole said it too has committed to bringing deforestation linked to its activities “down to zero” and is monitoring how clients apply those commitments.
BPCE, for its part, strongly criticised the two NGOs, speaking of “non-verifiable figures”, a lack of “clear methodology” and “evidence”. It said it would publish results from its own anti-deforestation policy at the end of 2025.
The Amazon rainforest plays a crucial role in limiting global warming, absorbing carbon dioxide that drives the greenhouse effect. The protection of tropical forests is one of the key themes at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, which concludes tomorrow.
A 2006 moratorium had already banned the commercial sale of soy produced on former forest land in the Amazon that was cleared after 2008.
Source: AMNA