Extract from The Guardian
Investigation exposes how Brazil’s huge beef sector continues to threaten health of world’s largest rainforest
The cows grazed under the midday Amazon sun, near a wooden bridge
spanning a river. It was an idyllic scene of pastoral quiet,
occasionally broken by a motorbike growling on the dirt road that cuts
through part of the Lagoa do Triunfo cattle farm to a nearby community.
But this pasture is land that the farm has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s government environment agency Ibama for illegal deforestation. Nearby were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and salt for cattle.
The vast 145,000-hectare (358,302-acre) farm is one of several owned by the company AgroSB Agropecuária SA – known in the region as Santa Bárbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km (372 miles) from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” – where farming eats into the rainforest. To get there takes hours of driving along dirt roads and a ferry ride from nearby São Félix do Xingu, a cattle town accessible only by plane until a few decades ago.
AgroSB supplies cattle to JBS, the world’s biggest meat packing company and single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, with 350,000 customers in more than 150 countries.
A joint investigation by the Guardian, Repórter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that during 2018, the Lagoa do Triunfo farm delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to other farms also owned by AgroSB for fattening. Cattle was sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants.
But this pasture is land that the farm has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s government environment agency Ibama for illegal deforestation. Nearby were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and salt for cattle.
The vast 145,000-hectare (358,302-acre) farm is one of several owned by the company AgroSB Agropecuária SA – known in the region as Santa Bárbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km (372 miles) from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” – where farming eats into the rainforest. To get there takes hours of driving along dirt roads and a ferry ride from nearby São Félix do Xingu, a cattle town accessible only by plane until a few decades ago.
AgroSB supplies cattle to JBS, the world’s biggest meat packing company and single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, with 350,000 customers in more than 150 countries.
A joint investigation by the Guardian, Repórter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that during 2018, the Lagoa do Triunfo farm delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to other farms also owned by AgroSB for fattening. Cattle was sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants.
Work by Stockholm-based NGO Trase, seen exclusively by our team, this week reveals the extent to which the international demand for beef is driving deforestation, with thousands of hectares of Amazon being felled every year to provide meat for world markets.
AgroSB is a powerful farming empire owned by the Opportunity group, co-founded by Daniel Dantas, a controversial businessman Bloomberg described as the “bad boy” of Brazilian finance. It owns half a million hectares across Pará and has long attracted controversy. Over the past decade, AgroSB has been accused of illegal deforestation, keeping workers in slave-like conditions, and spraying a community occupying one of its farms with pesticides – accusations it has strongly denied.
Scandal has also surrounded JBS, which is supplied by AgroSB. In 2017, following an Ibama investigation, the meat company was fined $7.7m for buying cattle from farms with embargoed areas, including another farm owned by AgroSB. The company pledged to stop buying cattle from the farm.
That same year, Joesley Batista, CEO of its controlling company, almost brought down the government of President Michel Temer after secretly recording him appearing to endorse bribery – Temer was indicted but never tried and has always denied the charges, claiming the recording was edited. Joesley and his brother Wesley, then JBS CEO, admitted an extensive web of bribery in a plea bargain deal.
He said just 7% of the farm was embargoed, and added that as AgroSB have been successful in appealing against some of the other embargos on their land, the company believes it will also overturn the embargos on Lagoa do Triunfo.
The ‘wild west’ fringe of the Amazon rainforest
With a population of 125,000 and more than two million cattle, the town of São Félix do Xingu covers an area bigger than Scotland. Cattle farming fed its growth from remote Amazon outpost to busy town, and there are clear signs of wealth here.Just outside town, big money was being splashed at a horse racing meet in a field full of 4x4s. As two jockeys spurred their horses down the rudimentary race track, a commentator bellowed and men waved wads of cash as their bets came in.
Both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls. Torres criticised Ibama as a “fines industry”, borrowing a phrase from President Jair Bolsonaro, who has dismantled environment protection and enjoys support from farmers like these. “How are you going to work if you can’t deforest an area, principally a small one?” said Rosa.
But the embargos do not appear to have affected AgroSB’s business, the Guardian and Réporter Brasil investigation found.
A JBS spokesman said: “The facts pointed out do not correspond to the standards and processes adopted by the Company”, indicating an independent 2018 audit that showed that “more than 99.9% of JBS’s cattle purchases meet the company’s socio-environmental criteria and the ‘Public Livestock Commitment’” – a deal signed between big cattle companies and Greenpeace in 2009. It was followed in 2011 by an agreement JBS and other meat companies signed with federal prosecutors not to buy cattle directly from embargoed or illegally deforested areas.
A spokesman told the Guardian via email: “JBS has a responsible purchase policy for raw materials and does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous reserves or environmental conservation areas, or that are embargoed by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama).”
The independent audit found the company had made impressive progress in tightening up procedures and shutting out farms with areas embargoed by Ibama. However, although the system excludes farms that have embargoed areas, the audit noted that other farms owned by the same company may still sell to JBS. It concluded that: “Indirect suppliers of cattle to JBS are not yet checked systematically, since JBS has not yet managed to adopt auditable procedures for its indirect suppliers.”
Growing international demand for beef has become a key driver in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, with new figures seen by our team revealing the full extent of deforestation directly linked to a handful of major food corporations. Beef linked to deforestation is exported globally, including to key markets in the east Asia and Europe.
An investigation by Trase has uncovered how up to 5,800 sq km of forest is being felled in the Amazon and other areas annually to be converted into pasture used for cattle farming, with livestock from deforested areas found to be supplying abattoirs producing beef for global markets.
Companies in JBS’s supply chain are potentially responsible for the destruction of between 28,000 and 32,000 hectares (280-320 sq km) of forest each year for exported beef, according to data assembled by Trase. There is no suggestion Lagoa do Triunfo beef is exported. AgroSB state that they purchased the land in 2008, after the deforestation had already happened. JBS points out that it has “one of the largest private supplier monitoring systems in the world… which covers the legal Amazon region.” It has been working on the GTA-Verde concept, which would cover all links in the supply chain and “prevent the entry of cattle from illegally deforested areas into the meat industry”.
The latest data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been on the rise since 2012. Between August 2017 and July 2018, about 7,900 sq km was destroyed.
The analysis includes data on “indirect” suppliers, which are often intermediate farms that don’t sell directly to abattoirs, but supply other farms which may truck cattle to slaughter. This is a “previously invisible” part of the beef chain, say researchers, which is not monitored for deforestation risks.
The supply chain “map” was then cross-referenced with official datasets on pasture expansion, deforestation rates and figures on regional cattle production in order to calculate a deforestation “risk” associated with specific companies and the main international export markets.
Because of the high volume of Brazilian beef shipped to China and Hong Kong, these markets are associated with the highest amount of deforestation in total – 16,000 and 22,500 hectares per year – according to the analysis. The EU also imports more than $600m worth of beef from Brazil each year. And that will increase if the EU and member states approve a new trade deal with Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to gradually let 99,000 tonnes of low-tariff South American beef into Europe every year.
Erasmus zu Ermgassen, lead researcher at Trase, said that while some slaughterhouses monitor their direct suppliers, none monitor their indirect suppliers. “There is enormous potential to use land more efficiently and sustainably in the Brazilian beef sector, and to improve rural livelihoods by investing in cattle ranching on existing pasturelands.”
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