How Nearly Two Decades of Investigations Lifted the Grey Curtain on “Cattle Laundering” at Brazilian Meat Firms
Foodthink Says
The inspection stamp from Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture and a 20-plus-digit export tracking code reveal that the tin of beef before you was imported from Brazil.
This unremarkable tin, available at budget chain supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s in the UK and Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, became a key piece of evidence in Repórter Brasil’s investigation into JBS, Brazil’s largest meat company, and its trade in illegally deforested beef.
As the world’s largest beef exporter, Brazil holds over 200 million head of livestock, forty per cent of which come from the biodiversity-rich Amazon region.
Driven by government policies encouraging agricultural development, this enormous carbon sink—dubbed “the lungs of the Earth”—is under relentless assault from deforestation, converted into pastures and fields of feed soybeans. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached 44 million hectares. Slash-and-burn deforestation provides low-cost grazing land and feed resources for livestock, underpinning the cost advantage of Brazil’s beef industry.
In the face of this enormous environmental cost, the Brazilian government issued the Conduct Adjustment Agreement (TAC da Carne) in 2009, explicitly prohibiting the sale of products from illegal deforestation.
But where there’s a policy, there’s a workaround. When cattle and sheep from illegally deforested ranches are secretly transferred to legitimate ranches for registration, they become “legal” products. This phenomenon is known as cattle laundering.
Over the past decade and a half, Repórter Brasil has developed a suite of investigative methods for tracing cattle laundering. Its director, Marcel Gomes, was awarded the 2024 Goldman Environmental Prize for this work, lifting a corner of the fog shrouding Brazil’s deforestation controversy.
I. “Cattle Laundering”: A Supply-Chain Conspiracy
Monopolies led by JBS, Marfrig and Minerva Foods tightly control the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants at the top of the supply chain, sourcing cattle through lower-tier suppliers.
But many ranches do not supply the companies directly. They are responsible only for growing out weaned calves on pasture—a stage in which the young animals develop their skeletal frame rather than put on weight—before the store cattle are sent to feedlots for fattening and finally readied for market. Cattle laundering most often occurs during these transfers.
“Ranchers who are related can transfer livestock freely without any formal paperwork,” Marcel Gomes told Yale Environment 360 in an interview. “Ranchers can also play numerical games, adjusting land boundaries to divide a single ranch into ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ sections, then laundering cattle from the illegal portion through their legal status.”
Although Brazil’s Animal Transport Guide stipulates that an Animal Transport Permit (Guia de Trânsito Animal, GTA) containing origin information must accompany livestock in transit, such data is not publicly available.
Moreover, the GTA records only a single transport event per animal; it does not cover the full supply chain, cannot determine whether cattle came from different ranches, and certainly cannot trace whether they originated in illegally deforested areas.
Yet JBS has repeatedly dodged its due diligence obligations, claiming more than once that it “can only trace back to direct suppliers” and is powerless against cattle laundering.
Repórter Brasil decided to step in and fill the last mile of the deforestation evidence trail, proving that tracing is possible. Combining satellite data, environmental fines, and traceability records from public sources, the team identified implicated ranches and companies, then joined forces with unions and indigenous communities to conduct interviews and field investigations, exposing the excuses.
II. Unable to Trace, or Deliberate Cattle Laundering?
Moreover, the investigation found that JBS was not “unable to trace” its supply at all—instead, it was actively soliciting cattle-transport contracts from deforested ranches.
First, driver Ale and his colleagues were JBS employees. Second, the transport route ran from Ranch F to Feedlot S carrying store cattle, then loaded the fattened animals and brought them to a JBS-owned slaughterhouse. This so-called “three-legged journey” had long been the industry’s open secret, and the investigation found that JBS actively promoted the use of its own trucks to transport cattle along this route.
By the team’s estimate, between 2018 and 2019 at least 7,000 head of livestock from Ranch A were laundered along the same route into JBS’s supply chain—the equivalent of thousands of tonnes of beef from illegal deforestation reaching the market in a single year.
This was no isolated case. In 2022, faced with another joint investigation led by Repórter Brasil and other organisations, JBS was forced to admit it had purchased 9,000 head of livestock from Charles Pozzebon, described as “one of Brazil’s biggest deforesters.” Pozzebon, sentenced to 99 years in prison, and his family had cleared 2,844 hectares of forest in the Amazon region, then laundered the cattle through legitimate ranches to supply JBS.
“If these meat companies decided to sever the grey areas in their supply chains, they would lose a substantial share of the market,” Marcel stated. “That is precisely why they deliberately choose not to monitor the full supply chain.” One might say that without cattle laundering, JBS’s annual revenue would never reach USD 78 billion.
There is as yet no clear estimate of what proportion of JBS’s meat production involves cattle laundering. According to satellite data analysis by the research firm Trase, between 2016 and 2020, deforestation and land conversion driven by Brazil’s livestock sector reached 292,000 hectares—an area exceeding that of China’s Lake Taihu. JBS ranked first among those responsible, with its deforestation footprint growing from 206,000 hectares in 2016 to 231,000 hectares in 2020, and its associated total exports of beef already exceeding one million tonnes.
III. “From the Table to the Ranch”
In 2020, the international advocacy organisation Mighty Earth approached Repórter Brasil to launch a cross-Atlantic campaign targeting both the production and consumption ends of Brazilian beef exports to Europe.
The two organisations jointly recruited a research team from four European countries. They visited every major chain supermarket, searching for JBS meat products and photographing the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture stamp and export tracking codes on the packaging.
Although Brazil’s government and meat industry already have traceability systems such as the Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, CAR) and Animal Transport Permits, the overall data in these systems remains incomplete, and self-reported information is difficult to verify. Marcel and his team devoted enormous effort to consolidating fragmented public data into the Cattle Tracker database, which is updated annually.
After this incident, Marcel and his team did not return to the field for a long time. That is why Repórter Brasil extends its gratitude to agricultural workers and indigenous communities on many occasions. They not only guide the research team in identifying ranches, mapping livestock-transport routes and connecting them with workers willing to expose the truth about forced labour, but also frequently shield the team from violent attacks.
IV. Pressuring the Retail End
Meanwhile, Mighty Earth had been spearheading a broad consumer advocacy campaign across Europe. They staged public protests against JBS’s environmental malpractice, raising consumer awareness.
In 2021, Repórter Brasil published a research report titled “Cattle Eating Up the World’s Largest Rainforest” (Cattle eating up the world’s largest rainforest), exposing that major retailers in Europe and the US were selling beef produced on deforested Brazilian ranches.
The report cited a study by market research firm YouGov and Mighty Earth, finding that 87 per cent of UK respondents did not want supermarkets doing business with companies that destroy the Amazon rainforest, and 56 per cent expressed willingness to buy “zero-deforestation” products.
As it turned out, pressuring retailers from the consumer end proved an effective strategy.
In mid-2021, Marcel sent a draft of the report to all stakeholders in the supply chain—JBS, chain supermarkets, traders and public health authorities among them—requesting a response. Mighty Earth, for its part, engaged directly with the supermarkets.
Unsurprisingly, JBS continued to deny any connection to the cattle laundering ranches disclosed in the report. The company announced plans to improve traceability through blockchain technology innovations and claimed it could eliminate illegal deforestation from its Amazon beef supply chain by 2025 and from all other Brazilian ecosystems by 2030. Marfrig and Minerva Foods made similar pledges.
Repórter Brasil pointed out that if the “big three” led by JBS continued to rely on easily falsifiable traceability data to monitor direct suppliers, these commitments amounted to little more than empty words.
Felipe Nunes, a specialist in data analytics and artificial intelligence, added that Brazil did not need to create new mechanisms but should instead make full use of existing public data to establish a broad, transparent cross-verification system, enabling more effective mapping and monitoring of Brazil’s livestock supply chain.
Once the report was officially published, six major chain supermarkets—including Sainsbury’s in the UK, Carrefour in Belgium and Auchan in France—announced a boycott of JBS beef imports. For the latter, this meant a drop in revenue amounting to millions of dollars.
Most recently, the EU market has raised the bar once more for Brazilian beef products.
At the end of 2024, the EU Zero Deforestation Regulation formally came into force, requiring all companies trading in agricultural commodities—including bovine-derived products from Brazil such as leather, beef and offal—to certify by law that their products were not produced on recently deforested land.
McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food companies have claimed they are in dialogue with their meat suppliers, but so far there has been no substantial progress.
V. Beyond the Cattle Laundering Controversy
In addition, labour rights abuses in the meat industry have long been a focus of Repórter Brasil’s investigations. In July 2024, they jointly published a research report with the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), exposing the appalling working conditions of slaughterhouse employees under JBS and Marfrig.
More than 137,000 workers across Brazil are engaged in packaging work at slaughterhouses. They endure not only excessively long hours and demanding production quotas, but also workplace hazards: eighty per cent of workers suffer from occupational diseases, and forty per cent have experienced accidental injuries from blades, machinery or the hooks used to hoist animal carcasses. Moreover, incidents of forced labour and encroachment on indigenous land rights continue to occur with disturbing regularity.
In China—the largest importer of Brazilian beef—attitudes toward imported beef are also shifting.
Last November, livestock industry associations from across China jointly filed a petition with the Ministry of Commerce, claiming that the low price and high volume of imported beef had severely disrupted the domestic beef cattle industry and requesting safeguard measures to protect it. On 31 March, the Ministry of Commerce will hold a hearing on whether to impose trade measures.
It is estimated that JBS accounts for 20–30 per cent of China’s total beef imports, while Marfrig has the largest number of export-registered processing facilities in South America for exports to China. According to publicly available information, JBS has successively signed cooperation agreements with JD Fresh and Hema, becoming a strategic supplier to both retail companies.
References
JBS admits to buying almost 9,000 cattle from ‘one of Brazil’s biggest deforesters’
The EU Zero Deforestation Regulation (EUDR): Impacts, Challenges, and Strategic Corporate Responses
https://trase.earth/insights/brazilian-beef-exports-and-deforestation_zh_cn
EU and UK announce a complete halt to beef imports from Brazil
Unless otherwise stated, images are from the Goldman Environmental Prize interview video
Intern Maomao also contributed to this article
Editors: Wang Hao, Tianle