JBS broke its supply chain rules buying cows from deforesters of Brazil’s wetlands.
Story by Naira Hofmeister and Fernanda Wenzel
the world’s biggest meat company bought cattle more than 100 times from a farm that was sanctioned and fined almost £2m for illegally destroying unique and vulnerable wetlands in Brazil, Unearthed can reveal.
Brazilian beef giant JBS, which supplies KFC, McDonalds, Walmart and Tesco, has been repeatedly linked to large-scale Amazon destruction. JBS’s cattle purchases appear to be in direct contravention of its promises to keep its supply chain clean.
The findings come as part of a wider investigation into the growing impact of Brazil’s beef industry on Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, a biodiversity hotspot that is increasingly threatened by wildfires and agribusiness. Our investigation, based on an analysis commissioned from satellite imagery experts AidEnvironment, found direct and indirect suppliers to Brazil’s top three meatpackers had denuded an area of at least seven times the size of Manhattan in the Pantanal in the past five years.
The vast majority of this, 93%, was linked to JBS. Unearthed then investigated the top 10 deforesters in the analysis and found direct JBS suppliers involved with illegal deforestation and an Indigenous land conflict.
JBS needs to be held responsible for both its reckless destruction of the ecosystem and its deceptive greenwashing
JBS has recently been promoting its deforestation controls and green credentials ahead of an attempt to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange. It says it is clamping down on deforestation in its supply chain, but is significantly expanding production in the Pantanal, with plans to create Latin America’s largest abattoir. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed wetland has just had one of its worst-ever wildfire seasons.
“It is appalling to find out that JBS continues to be a major cause of egregious deforestation, while it deceives customers with claims that it is reducing deforestation in its supply chain,” US Senator Cory Booker said in response to our investigation. “JBS needs to be held responsible for both its reckless destruction of the ecosystem and its deceptive greenwashing.”
In a statement, JBS said: “The farms mentioned are blocked by JBS and therefore automatically prevented from doing business with the company. Blocks caused by embargoes are carried out as soon as there is visibility in the systems fed by the public institutions responsible.”
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JBS did not comment on the scale of deforestation linked to its suppliers found by the investigation, and added that the farms were blocked before Unearthed contacted the company.
Brazil director of Mighty Earth, João Gonçalves, said: “To feed its massive meat operations JBS has demonstrated, once again, that it has little regard for people or planet by continuing to source cattle, more than 100 times, from a banned farm responsible for deforestation in the vulnerable Pantanal.
“A war on nature is being waged by the meat industry in the Pantanal and JBS is on the frontline,” he added.
The Pantanal is a unique mosaic of marshes, woodlands and rivers. It floods seasonally, its streams and rivers swollen by torrential rains that travel south from the Amazon rainforest. Until relatively recently, it has been a haven for wildlife, home to the world’s largest concentration of jaguars, hundreds of bird species and large mammals such as tapirs and giant anteaters.
While remaining high, Amazon deforestation has dropped since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in 2023. But it has continued to rise in its lesser-known neighbour the Pantanal, according to an analysis by mapping collaborative MapBiomas. Droughts, worsened by climate change and deforestation in the Amazon, make it easier for fires set by farmers to clear vegetation to burn out of control. This year satellites detected 10,956 fires from June to September, making this the second worst fire season since records began. Only 2020 was more intense, which killed more than 17 million vertebrates and burned almost 30% of the biome.
“We are facing one of the worst situations ever seen in the Pantanal,” Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, told journalists.
Brazil’s butchers
Since its beginnings 70 years ago as a family butcher in the state of Goiás, JBS has expanded to become the world’s biggest meat producer, with business interests across five continents.
This meteoric rise has demanded the large-scale transformation of large swathes of Brazil’s rainforests and savannahs into cattle ranches. In recent years, under increased international scrutiny for its role in Amazon deforestation, and seeking to list in the US, JBS has said it will eliminate all deforestation from its Brazilian Amazon supply chain by 2025 and country-wide, including the Pantanal, by 2030.
JBS has a “zero tolerance deforestation” policy and has blocked 16,000 ranchers who were not in compliance, JBS CEO Gilberto Tomazoni told The New York Times last year.
“We have put [in] a blockchain to get information from the indirect suppliers. Until now, we have around 50% of the indirect suppliers in the blockchain…when we are fully in this blockchain we can track 97% of our beef.”
But in the Pantanal, JBS is expanding its footprint. Earlier this year the company said it would double the capacity of its Campo Grande II abattoir, which receives cattle from many of the suppliers identified in this investigation, allowing it to slaughter 4,400 cows every day.
This February, the Campo Grande II abattoir received two deliveries of cattle from a farm called Fazenda Querência in Aquidauana municipality, Mato Grosso do Sul state, according to JBS’s transparency platform.
According to JBS’s own supply chain rules, this purchase should not have been possible. Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency, IBAMA, had placed an embargo for illegal deforestation over 1 sq km of the farm the month before, and JBS claims its systems automatically block it from buying cattle from any embargoed farms.
Embargoes are Brazil’s mechanism for punishing farmers for destroying vegetation without permission, or in areas that are legally supposed to be protected. They prevent illegally deforested land from being used, allowing vegetation to recover while imposing a financial penalty. Buying cattle from this farm directly violates JBS’s environmental commitments.
This embargo was cancelled in late October by a preliminary court ruling. But it was far from the only time JBS appears to have bought cattle from Querência while it was under sanction. From 2018 to 2023, JBS’s transparency platform lists 112 purchases of cattle by JBS’s Campo Grande I and II abattoirs from Fazenda Querência in Aquidauana. IBAMA records show that Fazenda Querencia had two active IBAMA embargoes during this period. One of these embargoes, imposed in 2016, covered 28 sq km, roughly half the size of Manhattan, and included a fine for almost £2m.
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The embargos were recently lifted, but in both cases, the farm owners had admitted to illegally deforestation of Pantanal vegetation.
(JBS’s platform only lists farm names and municipalities, but only one farm in Aquidauana named Fazenda Querência appears in Brazil’s national land registry.)
JBS declined to say when Querência or the other properties had been blocked, only that the “acquisitions followed JBS Purchasing Policy according to the available information at the time.”
In total, according to AidEnvironment’s analysis, Fazenda Querência cleared a total of 50 sq km of natural vegetation between 2019 and 2023 – destroying an area of the Pantanal equal to half the size of Paris.
In response to our questions, André Ribeiro Corrêa, a member of the family that owns Querência, said that they had contested the 2024 embargo. He sent a document showing a court order to lift the embargo while Ibama makes a final decision. Corrêa declined to comment further.
From 2018 to 2023, while regularly buying cattle from an embargoed farm, JBS exported 83 shipments of beef or cattle byproducts from Campo Grande municipality to the UK, totalling 1,350 tonnes, trade data collected by Panjiva suggest, although the data does not detail which abattoir the products originated from. JBS exports to the US from Campo Grande totaled 46,600 tonnes, and to Italy, which imports JBS cowhides for its leather industry, more than 24,000 tonnes. Panjiva data also suggests that JBS exported beef to Germany and the Netherlands from Campo Grande during this period.
“The meatpacking plants operating in the Pantanal are the same as those in the Amazon, but they apply fewer controls there to suppliers,” said Luciano Furtado Loubet, a state prosecutor from Mato Grosso do Sul who works on environmental enforcement. “The companies do not carry out audits to verify if their controls and systems are working properly,” he added.
AidEnvironment’s analysis tracked recent deforestation on a sample of farms that had directly or indirectly supplied Brazil’s biggest meatpackers – JBS, Marfrig and Minerva – from 2018-2019. Using GTAs from 2018-2019 – documents that track cattle between ranches and slaughterhouses, originally designed to prevent the spread of diseases – and satellite data, it found 190 farms had deforested a total of 426 sq km of the Pantanal biome from 2019 to 2023.
This number is likely to be an underestimate, as AidEnvironment only had access to a non-comprehensive sample of GTAs, and the meatpackers may have established new supply relationships since.
Marfrig said that from 2018 to 2019, it had bought cattle from 46 properties in the Pantanal, and subsequently blocked 17 of them when they were found to be in breach of one of the company’s commitments.
“The company reaffirms its commitment not to purchase animals from deforested areas, conservation units, indigenous lands, Quilombola territories, embargoed areas and properties or owners on the dirty list of labour analogous to slave labour in all the biomes where it operates,” Marfrig said in a statement, adding that it was already monitoring 100 percent of its direct suppliers and 93 percent of its indirect suppliers in the Pantanal.
Minerva said it had pledged to monitor all its direct and indirect suppliers in South America by 2030. Currently, it is monitoring all of its direct suppliers in Brazil, which are subject to annual audits, the company said.
“With each new animal sale, every property undergoes a compliance analysis, in accordance with the criteria adopted by the Company,” the statement read. “If any irregularities are identified in relation to the criteria, the supplier is blocked in the system, preventing further trade until the situation is regularised. In this context, the most recent audits show that all purchases made have reached 100 percent compliance.”
Of the total deforestation linked to the three companies, 394 sq km, or 93 percent, was associated with JBS – an area larger than the Isle of Wight.
Fazenda Querência’s huge swathe of land clearing accounts for 13% of the deforestation found in the sample of JBS suppliers analysed by AidEnvironment from 2019-2023.
The second-biggest deforester in the analysis, Fazenda Tupaceretã, converted 17 sq km of native vegetation between 2019 and 2023.
JBS stopped buying cattle from the farm while a 2018 embargo across 5.8 sq km was active. In fact, the farmer’s representative complained to IBAMA that the producer was “unable to sell cattle or access credit” as a result of the embargo. Trading with JBS resumed in 2020 after the owner of Tupaceretã paid “forest replacement fees” and a fine to IBAMA for the illegal land clearance.
But between September 2021 and April 2022 – during which period Tupaceretã sold three lots of cattle to JBS – land-use experts at MapBiomas found new deforestation in areas of the farm legally required to be preserved.
“The alert shows that deforestation was carried out for planting pasture,” said Eduardo Rosa, from MapBiomas’s Pantanal team.
JBS’s compliance system uses PRODES satellite data, which is released annually by Brazil’s space agency INPE. But MapBiomas publishes new deforestation alerts weekly, verified by staff and accompanied by detailed reports and high-resolution images.
The property was sold in December. Planet Labs satellite images from July and August show a vast 145 sq km area across Fazenda Tupaceretã that appears to have burned during this year’s fire season. Satellites have picked up more than 91 fires burning on the property this year. A lawyer for the new owners said they have not sold cattle since buying the farm. They did not offer an explanation for the fire.
JBS’s supply chain rules do not exclude farms which use fire to clear land, despite a 2021 Greenpeace investigation linking the record-breaking Pantanal fires of 2020 to JBS’s cattle suppliers.
A lawyer for Fazenda Tupaceretã’s previous owner Linneu Rondon, who died in April, said that Rondon’s estate has signed an agreement with the Mato Grosso do Sul Public Prosecutor’s Office to repair the environmental damage found on the farm, and has paid a fine to IBAMA to settle the 2018 embargo.
Embargoes are only one of JBS’s supply chain rules; another states the company “does not purchase from those involved with invasion of indigenous lands”.
But prosecutors have accused the owners of another Pantanal JBS supplier in our analysis, Fazenda Touro Peru, in Porto Murtinho municipality, Mato Grosso do Sul state, of farming on Indigenous territory. Touro Peru was a regular JBS supplier from 2018 to 2022, and deforested 4.4 sq km over the past five years.
Prosecutors alleged that its owners registered a different cattle farm, called Baía da Bugra, in the Kadiwéu Indigenous Territory, also in Porto Murtinho.
According to a 2021 judicial decision, the family sought to annul the official recognition of the indigenous territory, arguing their ownership of the farm pre-dates the demarcation of the Kadiwéu territory in the 1980s. The conflict is long-standing; in 2013 and 2017 members of the Kadiwéu ethnic group occupied the farm in protest.
Other farms belonging to the family, Fazenda Santa Lucia and Fazenda Sapucay, are also JBS suppliers in Aidenvironment’s analysis, totaling a further 1.7 sq km of deforestation. Around 60% of the Kadiwéu territory was burned during this year’s fires.
A lawyer for the family that owns the farms sent a statement after publication noting that Touro Peru had permits for the deforestation, and denied the family had “invaded” Indigenous lands.
He said that instead, it was “a dispute created by a government error, which expanded the area of the Kadiwéu Indigenous Reserve by means of a Decree, generating an overlap with the area of the Baía da Bugra Farm, whose process of canceling the expansion of the demarcation has been underway since the beginning of this year.”
Traditional farming under threat
For generations, the Pantanal has remained a stronghold for wildlife while still supporting traditional low-intensity farming compatible with preservation: cattle graze on the natural native grasslands and move with the seasonal flooding. Consequently, around 85% of the Pantanal’s native vegetation remains. Cows graze alongside species that are threatened elsewhere, such as marsh deer, white-lipped peccaries and giant anteaters.
But now the biome is under pressure from large-scale agribusiness in the neighbouring Cerrado biome, where grain crops, particularly soy, are driving deforestation.
“Around the Pantanal, soya has taken over. So the pressure to raise cattle is growing in the Pantanal because outside the biome there is no more room for it,” said biologist Gustavo Figueiroa, from SOS Pantanal, an NGO.
All the JBS suppliers that Unearthed has investigated – the top 10 deforesters in AidEnvironment’s analysis of the meatpacker’s suppliers – are situated in the five municipalities with the biggest burned area in 2024. A recent study from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro showed these were also among the most deforested locations in the Pantanal in 2023.
“Cattle farmers want to produce more per hectare and the way is to replace the native grassland with brachiaria pasture,” said Rafael Chiaravalloti, a professor specialising in Pantanal natural resource management.
The IBAMA embargoes imposed on the Querência and Tupaceretã farms all note that deforested areas were seeded with ‘brachiaria’ grass, an invasive species that competes with native grasses and is highly flammable.
With the expansion of JBS’s Campo Grande II slaughterhouse experts say demand for cattle in the Pantanal will rise.
“Any expansion of JBS’ meat operations will push the biome to breaking point, impacting the Amazon and the Cerrado,” said Mighty Earth’s Gonçalves. “JBS must get full control of its beef supply chains and urgently suspend all ranchers hell-bent on this destruction of nature for profit.”
As a wetland, the biome is also particularly sensitive to the drought currently impacting the entire continent. A recent WWF Brazil study predicts that this year could be the biome’s driest since records began – even worse than 2020, when a historic drought led to unprecedented fires, many of them started on cattle ranches.
“It is considered a drought when the Paraguay River drops below four metres. In the 2024 floods, this measurement did not exceed one metre,” said Helga Correa, conservation specialist at WWF-Brazil.
Now some scientists fear the wetlands may be approaching a tipping point, when the Pantanal would lose its capacity for natural recovery, suffering an abrupt loss of species.
“The Pantanal is one of the most biodiverse wetlands in the world,” Correa said. “It is a heritage that we need to conserve.”
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WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP STOP THIS DESTRUCTION? GIVE UP EATING MEAT AND DAIRY; REDUCE YOUR INTAKE OF MEAT AND DAIRY; BUY YOUR MEAT FROM LOCALLY SOURCED FARMS WITH THE HIGHEST ANIMAL WELFARE = STOP/REDUCE/BUY LOCAL /HIGHEST ANIMAL WELFARE. GO ON – YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE!!