Caroline Wimberly traveled to Durban, South Africa in late August 2015 to attend three conferences on behalf of Brighter Green. Afterwards, she traveled extensively around the country. This blog is the second in a four-part series on her experiences and observations during the trip.

One of the major producers for KFC in South Africa is RCL Foods (previously Rainbow Chicken), which is the country’s largest chicken processor. In 1997, Rainbow Chicken teamed up with U.S. agribusiness Cobb to create Cobb South Africa (now under the umbrella of RCL Foods). This partnership allowed for the introduction of the industry super-breed, Cobb500, into the country. This breed is considered the world’s most “productive” broiler chicken and was developed in the U.K. in the 1970s.

In the style of U.S. poultry giants like Tyson, Rainbow employs vertical integration throughout their supply chain, contracting different growers to provide its poultry products. These providers mimic U.S. growers with factory farm conditions, including indoor confinement of the birds without outdoor access, processed feed, and artificially short life cycles. To give an example of the scale of these growers, here are some production statistics from one Rainbow supplier, Essaurinca from 2013:

• They expanded from 8 sheds to 11 sheds to increase yields and more effectively provide for KFC quota levels (via the Rainbow supply chain);
• Through this expansion, they produced 300,000 broiler chickens per 35-day growing cycle (with about 27,000 birds being raised in each shed);
• They increased from six-and-a-half to eight growing cycles per year, producing around 2.4 million birds per year.

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Caroline Wimberly traveled to Durban, South Africa in late August 2015 to attend three conferences on behalf of Brighter Green. Afterwards, she traveled extensively around the country. This blog is the first in a four-part series on her experiences and observations during the trip.

As Brighter Green has documented previously (here and here, to start), Western-style fast food chains have expanded quickly in the developing world. Judy Bankman wrote about the effects of these chains on public health and food security in South Africa. I saw my fair share of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outposts during my travels. In fact, I encountered more KFCs in South Africa than any other quick service food chain (including McDonalds). Cheap, “finger-licking” chicken products are highly popular, and due to the quick development of industrial poultry facilities around the country, are widely available.

In 2012, South Africa had more than 600 KFC outlets, with about 8-10% of the commercial chickens produced domestically being sold through KFC, according to a KFC executive. As of October 2015, there are over 800 restaurants, according to KFC South Africa’s website (about a 33% increase from 2012). Below is a map from their website showing the distribution of these locations: Read More

Here are the comments Brighter Green submitted to the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) in May 2015 in support of including sustainability criteria in the revised “Dietary Guidelines for Americans.” The Guidelines help determine U.S. national nutrition policies and food procurement (purchasing) programs. This year, for the first time, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), the independent scientific body that advises the USDA and HHS, recommended adoption of sustainability considerations in the 2015 edition of the Guidelines. 

You can read all of the more than 24,000 comments submitted to USDA and HHS—a record—here: In addition to the comments, more then 200,000 people signed petitions supporting inclusion of sustainability in the Guidelines. Please see My Plate, My Planet: for more on the sustainability language and what’s at stake as the Guidelines are revised. Read More

This blog entry was originally written by What’s For Dinner? director Jian Yi on a train ride to Beijing on World Vegetarian Day (October 1) 2014.

What’s For Dinner? and Vegucated have had six successful screenings in Guangzhou. Much gratitude is due to the efforts of our friends at GAFA, Young City, Yi’he Vegetarian Restaurant, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, the South China Normal University, the South China University of Technology, and the Guangdong Food and Drug Vocational School.

My arrival in Beijing today coincided with this year’s World Vegetarian Day. Restaurants and snack bars populate the modern, spacious waiting hall of the Guangzhou South train station. And yet not one offers a hot vegetarian breakfast. Every neatly packaged bun sold in the convenience stores contains meat, and the situation is no different at the fast food restaurants. Perhaps you will say that McDonald’s does not traditionally offer vegetarian food? But McDonald’s traditionally does not offer fried Chinese bread sticks either; a fact which does not seem to stop them from being sold at Guangzhou South station.

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No matter where we are, there is one thing in common for the end of year holidays, whether you’re celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or another festival: food. Special dishes. Holiday meals. Gathering around a table. It’s time to be merry and stay happy, to try and forget about sorrow and anger, and often, to give up asking too many questions—questions that may lead to the truth, and the truth can be inconvenient.

On November 28 and 29, 2014, Brighter Green’s Mia MacDonald and Wanqing Zhou joined environmental and rights advocates at the International Strategy Meeting on Impacts of Unsustainable Livestock and Feed Production and Threats to Community Conservation in Paraguay. The meeting and field trips were organized by the Global Forest Coalition, an international non-profit network of organizations based in Paraguay and the Netherlands.
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