Countries from across Asia are convening in Melbourne this week to negotiate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade deal that would impact almost half of the world’s population, including Thailand, Indonesia, China, India, Japan, Korea and Australia.

Trade deals seem to be impenetrable and remote aspects of international legal systems that are disconnected from local and national realities. But in fact the opposite is true.

Trade and investment profoundly impacts local and national issues, and can undermine basic human and environmental rights and key principles of democracy.  

Corporate profit 

The RCEP focuses on trade and investment liberalization, intellectual property rights, services, competition policy – much like other trade agreements. 

It would influence how governments regulate our economy. The talks go on behind closed doors and lack democratic oversight, so the resulting deal is likely to put corporate profit before public interest. 

Leaked documents show that the proposed RCEP trade deal includes a mechanism called the Investor-State Disputes Settlement (ISDS).

ISDS is, in essence, a corporate court system in which companies can sue countries when they consider that government decisions or national court rulings impact on their profits. 

New research from Friends of the Earth International/Europe, Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory has uncovered the human impact of these corporate courts, in which governments have been sued for US$623 billion in almost 1000 ISDS cases. This is equivalent to more than four years of the combined global spending on Overseas Development Assistance for poverty reduction.

Environmental protection

In the rice paddy fields of Thailand, local farmers accused a gold mine of leaking toxic waste, causing serious health problems and ruining crops. The Thai government responded by suspending the mine, and later halting all gold mining in the country, while a new mineral law was developed.

But in 2017, instead of compensating the local communities for the harm caused, the Australian mine owners, Kingsgate, sued the Thai government for millions of dollars in compensation. They used the ISDS mechanism that was included in the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and Thailand.

The dispute between Kingsgate, environmentalists and local peoples, who say they had been negatively impacted by the mine, stretches back many years.

In 2010, villagers took the company to court for failing to mitigate damages and for obtaining mining permits illegally. The court ruled that the mine had indeed breached environmental protection laws, and ordered the company to submit an Environmental Health Impact Assessment.

Operations were later suspended at the Kingsgate mine in 2015 for several months, amidst ongoing environmental protests and medical tests which found that hundreds of people living near the mine had high levels of toxic substances in their blood. The company itself acknowledged problems with dust, contaminated water, noise, and cyanide management in its own reports, and researcherscriticised its “lack of true community consultation”.

Democratic procedures

Environmental problems at Kingsgate’s mine occurred after violence had erupted at another controversial mine in the country, the Loei Gold Mine, when over 300 armed, masked men attacked and beat up villagers who were blocking access to the mine.

These problems in the gold sector led the military junta who were ruling the country to halt all gold mines nationwide in 2017 “due to their impact on locals and the environment”. While human rights groups welcomed the closure, the law used in the process has also been criticised, as they empower the Prime Minister to issue any order arbitrarily without following legal and other democratic procedures.

Kingsgate hit back with threats of a multimillion-dollar international arbitration lawsuit. This threat seemed to have paid off. In 2017 the Thai government agreed to lift the suspension on the mine’s operation, which in turn led to a steep rise in the company’s share price.

Yet Kingsgate has not re-opened the mine. Instead it filed the ISDS case under the Thailand-Australia Free Trade Agreement claiming expropriation and seeking damages of an undisclosed amount. According to the national media, the ISDS claim could be worth US$900 million, a figure the government has denied.

Toxic water

While the Australian government views ISDS cases like this one as defending the national interest abroad, it is, rather, a way for corporations to entrench their power at the expense of local communities.

Rather than engaging with national research institutes, the precautionary principle or the local community’s knowledge, the case will be decided by three investment arbitrators, applying narrow investment law in a secret back room process.

The arbitrators’ decision could impact the entire country through the precedent it sets for regulation in Thailand. And while the ISDS case is ongoing, the company has reportedly not rehabilitated the mine that was leaking toxic substances into water sources.

This is not an isolated example. New research has uncovered how afterColombia’s Constitutional Court banned mining activities in a sensitive ecosystem which provides drinking water for millions of Colombians, Canadian mining company Eco Oro sued the country for US$764 million in damages.

When Croatian courts cancelled illegal permits issued for a luxury golf resort in the city of Dubrovnik, Croatia was hit with a US$500 million compensation claim. Romania is defending itself from a shocking US$5.7 billion claim by Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources, after the country’s courts declared the company’s proposed toxic Roşia Montana gold mine illegal.

Accountability

The growing number of corporate lawsuits has raised a global storm of opposition to ISDS and the corporate trade agenda more broadly from across the political spectrum. Two countries party to the RCEP trade negotiations, Indonesia and India, have started to reform ISDS by cancelling Bilateral Investment Treaties.

Yet, as the RCEP is a regional trade deal, if ISDS corporate courts are finally pushed through in exchange for increased market access, it will likely be locked in for years to come.

Given the current global trade wars, governments seem fixated on rushing headlong into new agreements.

Rather than more of the same failed corporate trade models, we need a new trade policy that enables communities and states to hold investors and corporations accountable for their damaging environmental impacts and human rights violations.

The RECP negotiations in Melbourne will test governments’ capacity to look after the environment and their citizens. 

This Author 

Sam Cossar is a campaigner for economic justice at Friends of the Earth International and a co-author of the new report ‘Red Carpet Courts: How the Rich and Powerful Hijacked Justice’. He tweets from @samcossar.

Image: Roengrit Kongmuang. 

Climate change made last week’s record-breaking European heatwave at least five times as likely to happen, analysis suggests.

Rapid assessment of average temperatures in France and Toulouse between June 26-28 show a “substantial” increase in the likelihood of the heatwave happening as a result of human-caused global warming, the experts said.

Temperatures observations suggest the kind of extreme heat seen last week has become at least 10 times, and potentially 100 times, more likely since 1900, analysis from the World Weather Attribution group found.

Health

But the scientists said other factors were at play which affect temperatures, along with climate change, such as changes to land use, air pollution and irrigation.

Combining observations with models that compare today’s world with 1C of global warming with what conditions would be without human influence suggests climate change made the heatwave at least five times more likely.

The analysis also suggests that such heatwaves are 4C hotter than a similar event would have been a century ago.

Top temperature records were smashed in parts Europe, including France which saw a new high of 45.9C (114.6F), more than 1.5C above the previous record.

But the analysis focused on the three-day average which includes night time temperatures as well as day time highs, has more impact on human health.

Extreme

For France temperatures averaged 27.5C (81F), and in Toulouse, chosen because some of the scientists involved were at a conference there at the time, it was more than 30C (86F) over that period.

The experts also warned a heatwave in June is potentially more serious for people as the holiday season has not yet begun and it is harder for people to avoid the highest temperatures.

Dr Friederike Otto, acting director of the environmental change institute at the University of Oxford and one of the experts behind the analysis, said: “This is a strong reminder again, that climate change is happening here and now. It is not a problem for our kids only.”

“Both observations and models show a strong trend towards stronger heatwaves. However, the observed trend is stronger than the modelled one, and we do not yet know why.”

Peter Stott, from the UK Met Office who is an expert in analysing the role of climate change in extreme weather, said: “Observations of present-day heatwaves show a very large increase in temperature, in fact, a similarly extreme heatwave 100 years ago would have likely been around 4C cooler.”

Air

The analysis comes as Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) revealed that European average temperatures for June had been the highest on record for the month, with temperatures more than 2C above normal.

Globally June was also the hottest on record, with average temperatures outstripping the previous record for the month in 2016 by 0.1C.

Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of C3S, said: “Although local temperatures may have been lower or higher than those forecast, our data show that the temperatures over the southwestern region of Europe during the last week of June were unusually high.

“Although this was exceptional, we are likely to see more of these events in the future due to climate change.”

The Met Office said the UK was spared the scorching temperatures seen in parts of Europe as a result of an “undercut of cooler air coming in from the North Sea”.

Record-breaking

Weather balloon evidence showed the air 1.5km above Cornwall was 24.8C (76.7F) in the early hours of Friday morning, spokesman Grahame Madge said.

“Air is cooler aloft, so comparable values at ground level would have been much warmer.

“These extreme temperatures, possible reaching 40C (104F) by day, were prevented by an undercut of cooler air coming in from the North Sea.

“Without this cooling, easterly influence, we would undoubtedly have seen much higher values on the ground; most likely an extension of the record-breaking temperatures seen across continental Europe, where national June and all-time temperature records widely fell,” he said.

This Author

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.

How did Nigel Lawson become big in Spain? With a little help from his powerful friends, of course.

Spain’s former Prime Minister José María Aznar has actively promoted the work of climate science deniers including former UKchancellor Lawson through a thinktank based just behind Madrid’s Ritz hotel, an investigation by La Marea’s Climatica, DeSmog’s Spanish-language partner, reveals.

Aznar has led the FAES Foundation (also known as the Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis) since he left office in 2004. The organisation’s aim is “to create, promote and disseminate ideas based on political, intellectual and economic freedom, as well as to reinforce the values of freedom, democracy, rule of law, free market economy and Western humanism,” according to its website.

Promoting deniers

FAES has worked towards these aims partly through the promotion of climate science denial.

In 2009, FAES’ publication house Gota a Gota released a version of Nigel Lawson’s climate science denial tome, A Cool Look at Global Warming. It was presented at an event by Elvira Rodríguez, Spain’s former Environment Minister under Aznar.

In the book, Lawson, who is the founder of the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, declares: “The new religion of global warming, however comfortable it may be for politicians, is not as harmless as it may seem at first glance. Certainly, the more we analyse it, the more it resembles a da Vinci Code of ecologism.

“It’s a great story and a formidable sales success. It contains a pinch of truth… and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense can be really very harmful.”

FAES’ 2009 Annual Report says that Lawson’s work “defends the ‘uncomfortable evidence’ that progress is achieved with ‘a free, open and well-functioning market economy’, and not with an economy bowed to the demands of the ‘new licence to meddle, interfere and regulate: the great cause of saving the planet from the supposed horrors of global warming’.”

‘Modest editor’

Lawson’s wasn’t the only the climate science denial touchstone to be promoted by FAES. A year earlier, Aznar had presented the Gota a Gota publication of an essay by climate science denier and former President and Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, entitled ‘Blue Planet (Not Green)’.

At the event, Aznar said he had been “a modest editor” and stated that Klaus’ essay “invites us to put reasonable doubt before politically correct”, reading this passage from the essay: “In the last 150 years, at least since Marx, the socialists have been effectively destroying human freedom, with slogans of apparent human and humanistic interest: for the human being, for his social equality with others, for his good.

“Ecologists do it through slogans of no less noble interest: for nature and for a kind of superhuman good. Let’s remember his radical motto: ‘Earth First’. In both cases, the slogans were (and are) a simple cover.

“In reality it was (and is) about power, about the supremacy of the ‘chosen’ (as they consider themselves), over the rest of us, about the implantation of a single correct ideology (their own)”.

Denying denial

Aznar rejects that he is a climate science denier, however, saying:“I am not what some call a climate change denier. I don’t know if there is a climate change in which man’s action is – or not – determinant.

“I don’t know because I’m not an expert scientist on these subjects. What I am is a citizen who today I say loud and clear that I have, like any other citizen, the right to say that there should be freedom to debate issues like this.”

This Author

Mat Hope is Editor of DeSmog UK. This article was first published on DeSmog UK, in partnership with Climatica, a publication of La Marea.

The cows grazed under a hot sun near a wooden bridge spanning a river in the Amazon. The quiet was occasionally broken by a motorbike growling along a dirt road that cut through the sprawling cattle ranch.

But the idyllic pasture was on land that the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s environment agency Ibama as a punishment for deforestation. Nearby there were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and fresh salt used to feed cattle — all in apparent contravention of rules designed to protect vital rainforest.

This vast 145,000 hectare ranch is one of several owned by AgroSB Agropecuária SA — a company known in the region as Santa Barbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará, on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” — where farming eats into the rainforest. 

Fines

An investigation by the Bureau, The Guardian and Repórter Brasil has found that cattle produced by Santa Barbara are being sold to JBS, the world’s biggest meat-packing company.

JBS is the single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, and exports fresh beef to Europe and about half of the corned beef eaten in the UK. In 2017, JBS said it had stopped buying Santa Barbara cattle, after it was fined $7.7 million for buying cows raised on illegally deforested land — but our investigation shows that is no longer the case.

The investigation found that last year the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to some of Santa Barbara’s other farms for the final stage of fattening. Cattle was then sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants. Using GPS and publicly available maps and locations, reporters located cattle and pasture inside embargoed areas at Lagoa do Triunfo. 

The revelations come as work by Trase, an NGO, shared exclusively with our team, has revealed how huge swathes of felled rainforest can be traced back to this cattle trade — and how beef raised on deforested land ends up in international supply chains.

Embargoes — restrictions that ban farmers guilty of deforestation or environmental damage from using parts of their own land — are imposed by the Brazilian government and serve both as a punishment and a protective measure to allow land to recover. They can be more effective than fines because they come at a higher cost for farmers. 

Farming

But our investigative team visited land clearly demarcated as embargoed on government websites, and found grazing cows there. A worker at the ranch said that cattle were left to roam in areas employees knew were embargoed. “You can’t cut down the vegetation,” the employee said. “The vegetation grows and we work the cattle inside.” 

Santa Barbara is an enormous, powerful ranching empire, owned by the billionaire Daniel Dantas, that controls half a million hectares across Pará. In 2008 Dantas was twice arrested on bribery charges and handed a ten-year sentence as a result of a corruption investigation that also saw his land confiscated. The investigation’s findings were subsequently overturned, the sentence dropped and Dantas got all his land back. 

Over the past decade, according to Repórter Brasil, Santa Barbara has been accused of illegal deforestation and faced allegations of using slave-like labour — accusations it strongly denies. Lagoa do Triunfo is one of its largest ranches. There are 12 separate embargoed areas on it, dating from 2010 to 2013. 

With a population of 125,000 people and over two million cattle, the town of Sao Félix do Xingu, the capital of Pará state, covers an area bigger than Scotland. Cattle ranching fed its growth from remote Amazon outpost to busy town. And there is money here: farmers’ wives are happy to pay $600 for a handbag, said Kelli Moraes, a 25-year-old sales assistant. “They are very fashion.” 

Sao Félix do Xingu was mostly forest when Arlindo Rosa, now president of the town’s union of rural producers, arrived in 1993. “There was practically none of this farming … there was no highway, there was nothing,” he said. 

Cattle

“People came from outside with the spirit to raise cattle,” said his vice-president, Francisco Torres, who arrived in 1987. Santa Barbara, the region’s biggest ranching company, began buying land near Sao Félix do Xingu in 2006, Torres said.

Torres said many ranches in the area have suffered Ibama embargoes. “If they removed those embargoes, a lot would improve,” said Rosa. As is common with farmers and landowners in Amazon areas, both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls. Rosa owes $1.4 million to Ibama in fines for deforestation, according to the agency’s website.

But embargoes have not stopped Santa Barbara illegally grazing cattle on deforested land, nor JBS being able to perfectly legally do business with the company, our investigation found.

JBS Beef Brazil’s “responsible procurement policy” says it “does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests … or that are embargoed” by Ibama. But the company has also said that the common practice of transferring cattle from one farm to another for fattening can make it impossible to trace individual cows.

Official state documents seen by the Bureau, the Guardian and Repórter Brasil showed that from January to October 2018, Santa Barbara delivered at least 296 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to its Espiríto Santo ranch in Xinguara, in the same state. Between July 2018 and January this year, Santa Barbara sent 2,900 cattle from the Espiríto Santo ranch to JBS slaughterhouses. 

Ranching

Throughout 2018, Santa Barbara also sent at least 729 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to be fattened at its Porto Rico ranch in Xinguara. In April 2018, 36 cattle from the Porto Rico ranch were sent to slaughter at a JBS plant.

JBS said that 99.9 percent of its cattle purchases meet its socio-environmental criteria and that it was working to implement “a new procedure to cover all links in the supply chain” and stop the use of “cattle from illegally deforested areas”.

Santa Barbara said it did not carry out deforestation to increase its area “but rather recovers degraded areas” and turns them into pastures. It said that trees on the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch had been felled before the Forest Code was introduced and that only seven percent of the land is under embargo.

New research tracking beef cattle back to the ranches they were raised on has revealed the full extent of deforestation in the Amazon that is linked to a handful of global food corporations.

Trase, a supply chain research project developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, tracked livestock from deforested areas to abattoirs producing beef for international markets, as well as meat for domestic use. Up to 5,800 square kilometres of forest is being felled in the Amazon and other areas every year for cattle ranching.

Political

The destruction of between 280-320 sq km of forest each year is linked to JBS’s supply chain for exported beef, according to the data assembled by Trase. There is no suggestion any Lagoa do Triunfo beef is exported.

JBS, which slaughters almost 35,000 cattle in Brazil per day, has faced a string of allegations relating to deforestation. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, raided and ordered the suspension of two JBS meat-packing plants in Pará accused of having purchased cattle raised on illegally deforested land between 2013 and 2016.

JBS denied the allegations but was fined R$24.7 million ($8 million). In the same year, a Guardian investigation with Repórter Brasil revealed how the company had purchased cattle linked to poor labour conditions and deforestation, resulting in UK supermarket Waitrose removing the company’s products from its shelves. 

The findings come amid growing international concern over the looming impacts of climate change, with the Amazon forest seen by experts as a crucial buffer in stabilising regional and global climate. 

Between 1980 and 2005, Amazon deforestation levels reached 20,000 sq km per year — with an area the size of Wales being lost. Although there have been political murmurings about trying to halt the destruction, the latest data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen by 73 percent since 2012. 

Pasturelands

Erasmus zu Ermgassen, lead researcher at Trase, said: “Though some slaughterhouses monitor their direct suppliers and so in theory can avoid farms associated with deforestation, none monitor their indirect suppliers, who make up the bulk of their supply chain.”

Trase added: “There is a huge opportunity to reduce the deforestation associated with the production and exports of beef in Brazil. 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.”

Trase will release the data in full later this month.

This Article

This article is published in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and is written by Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal and Lucy Michaels in London, Dominic Phillips, André Campos and Diego Junqueira in Sao Paulo and Claire Smyth in Belfast.

The cows grazed under a hot sun near a wooden bridge spanning a river in the Amazon. The quiet was occasionally broken by a motorbike growling along a dirt road that cut through the sprawling cattle ranch.

But the idyllic pasture was on land that the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s environment agency Ibama as a punishment for deforestation. Nearby there were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and fresh salt used to feed cattle — all in apparent contravention of rules designed to protect vital rainforest.

This vast 145,000 hectare ranch is one of several owned by AgroSB Agropecuária SA — a company known in the region as Santa Barbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará, on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” — where farming eats into the rainforest. 

Fines

An investigation by the Bureau, The Guardian and Repórter Brasil has found that cattle produced by Santa Barbara are being sold to JBS, the world’s biggest meat-packing company.

JBS is the single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, and exports fresh beef to Europe and about half of the corned beef eaten in the UK. In 2017, JBS said it had stopped buying Santa Barbara cattle, after it was fined $7.7 million for buying cows raised on illegally deforested land — but our investigation shows that is no longer the case.

The investigation found that last year the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to some of Santa Barbara’s other farms for the final stage of fattening. Cattle was then sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants. Using GPS and publicly available maps and locations, reporters located cattle and pasture inside embargoed areas at Lagoa do Triunfo. 

The revelations come as work by Trase, an NGO, shared exclusively with our team, has revealed how huge swathes of felled rainforest can be traced back to this cattle trade — and how beef raised on deforested land ends up in international supply chains.

Embargoes — restrictions that ban farmers guilty of deforestation or environmental damage from using parts of their own land — are imposed by the Brazilian government and serve both as a punishment and a protective measure to allow land to recover. They can be more effective than fines because they come at a higher cost for farmers. 

Farming

But our investigative team visited land clearly demarcated as embargoed on government websites, and found grazing cows there. A worker at the ranch said that cattle were left to roam in areas employees knew were embargoed. “You can’t cut down the vegetation,” the employee said. “The vegetation grows and we work the cattle inside.” 

Santa Barbara is an enormous, powerful ranching empire, owned by the billionaire Daniel Dantas, that controls half a million hectares across Pará. In 2008 Dantas was twice arrested on bribery charges and handed a ten-year sentence as a result of a corruption investigation that also saw his land confiscated. The investigation’s findings were subsequently overturned, the sentence dropped and Dantas got all his land back. 

Over the past decade, according to Repórter Brasil, Santa Barbara has been accused of illegal deforestation and faced allegations of using slave-like labour — accusations it strongly denies. Lagoa do Triunfo is one of its largest ranches. There are 12 separate embargoed areas on it, dating from 2010 to 2013. 

With a population of 125,000 people and over two million cattle, the town of Sao Félix do Xingu, the capital of Pará state, covers an area bigger than Scotland. Cattle ranching fed its growth from remote Amazon outpost to busy town. And there is money here: farmers’ wives are happy to pay $600 for a handbag, said Kelli Moraes, a 25-year-old sales assistant. “They are very fashion.” 

Sao Félix do Xingu was mostly forest when Arlindo Rosa, now president of the town’s union of rural producers, arrived in 1993. “There was practically none of this farming … there was no highway, there was nothing,” he said. 

Cattle

“People came from outside with the spirit to raise cattle,” said his vice-president, Francisco Torres, who arrived in 1987. Santa Barbara, the region’s biggest ranching company, began buying land near Sao Félix do Xingu in 2006, Torres said.

Torres said many ranches in the area have suffered Ibama embargoes. “If they removed those embargoes, a lot would improve,” said Rosa. As is common with farmers and landowners in Amazon areas, both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls. Rosa owes $1.4 million to Ibama in fines for deforestation, according to the agency’s website.

But embargoes have not stopped Santa Barbara illegally grazing cattle on deforested land, nor JBS being able to perfectly legally do business with the company, our investigation found.

JBS Beef Brazil’s “responsible procurement policy” says it “does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests … or that are embargoed” by Ibama. But the company has also said that the common practice of transferring cattle from one farm to another for fattening can make it impossible to trace individual cows.

Official state documents seen by the Bureau, the Guardian and Repórter Brasil showed that from January to October 2018, Santa Barbara delivered at least 296 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to its Espiríto Santo ranch in Xinguara, in the same state. Between July 2018 and January this year, Santa Barbara sent 2,900 cattle from the Espiríto Santo ranch to JBS slaughterhouses. 

Ranching

Throughout 2018, Santa Barbara also sent at least 729 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to be fattened at its Porto Rico ranch in Xinguara. In April 2018, 36 cattle from the Porto Rico ranch were sent to slaughter at a JBS plant.

JBS said that 99.9 percent of its cattle purchases meet its socio-environmental criteria and that it was working to implement “a new procedure to cover all links in the supply chain” and stop the use of “cattle from illegally deforested areas”.

Santa Barbara said it did not carry out deforestation to increase its area “but rather recovers degraded areas” and turns them into pastures. It said that trees on the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch had been felled before the Forest Code was introduced and that only seven percent of the land is under embargo.

New research tracking beef cattle back to the ranches they were raised on has revealed the full extent of deforestation in the Amazon that is linked to a handful of global food corporations.

Trase, a supply chain research project developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, tracked livestock from deforested areas to abattoirs producing beef for international markets, as well as meat for domestic use. Up to 5,800 square kilometres of forest is being felled in the Amazon and other areas every year for cattle ranching.

Political

The destruction of between 280-320 sq km of forest each year is linked to JBS’s supply chain for exported beef, according to the data assembled by Trase. There is no suggestion any Lagoa do Triunfo beef is exported.

JBS, which slaughters almost 35,000 cattle in Brazil per day, has faced a string of allegations relating to deforestation. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, raided and ordered the suspension of two JBS meat-packing plants in Pará accused of having purchased cattle raised on illegally deforested land between 2013 and 2016.

JBS denied the allegations but was fined R$24.7 million ($8 million). In the same year, a Guardian investigation with Repórter Brasil revealed how the company had purchased cattle linked to poor labour conditions and deforestation, resulting in UK supermarket Waitrose removing the company’s products from its shelves. 

The findings come amid growing international concern over the looming impacts of climate change, with the Amazon forest seen by experts as a crucial buffer in stabilising regional and global climate. 

Between 1980 and 2005, Amazon deforestation levels reached 20,000 sq km per year — with an area the size of Wales being lost. Although there have been political murmurings about trying to halt the destruction, the latest data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen by 73 percent since 2012. 

Pasturelands

Erasmus zu Ermgassen, lead researcher at Trase, said: “Though some slaughterhouses monitor their direct suppliers and so in theory can avoid farms associated with deforestation, none monitor their indirect suppliers, who make up the bulk of their supply chain.”

Trase added: “There is a huge opportunity to reduce the deforestation associated with the production and exports of beef in Brazil. 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.”

Trase will release the data in full later this month.

This Article

This article is published in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and is written by Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal and Lucy Michaels in London, Dominic Phillips, André Campos and Diego Junqueira in Sao Paulo and Claire Smyth in Belfast.

The cows grazed under a hot sun near a wooden bridge spanning a river in the Amazon. The quiet was occasionally broken by a motorbike growling along a dirt road that cut through the sprawling cattle ranch.

But the idyllic pasture was on land that the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s environment agency Ibama as a punishment for deforestation. Nearby there were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and fresh salt used to feed cattle — all in apparent contravention of rules designed to protect vital rainforest.

This vast 145,000 hectare ranch is one of several owned by AgroSB Agropecuária SA — a company known in the region as Santa Barbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará, on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” — where farming eats into the rainforest. 

Fines

An investigation by the Bureau, The Guardian and Repórter Brasil has found that cattle produced by Santa Barbara are being sold to JBS, the world’s biggest meat-packing company.

JBS is the single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, and exports fresh beef to Europe and about half of the corned beef eaten in the UK. In 2017, JBS said it had stopped buying Santa Barbara cattle, after it was fined $7.7 million for buying cows raised on illegally deforested land — but our investigation shows that is no longer the case.

The investigation found that last year the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to some of Santa Barbara’s other farms for the final stage of fattening. Cattle was then sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants. Using GPS and publicly available maps and locations, reporters located cattle and pasture inside embargoed areas at Lagoa do Triunfo. 

The revelations come as work by Trase, an NGO, shared exclusively with our team, has revealed how huge swathes of felled rainforest can be traced back to this cattle trade — and how beef raised on deforested land ends up in international supply chains.

Embargoes — restrictions that ban farmers guilty of deforestation or environmental damage from using parts of their own land — are imposed by the Brazilian government and serve both as a punishment and a protective measure to allow land to recover. They can be more effective than fines because they come at a higher cost for farmers. 

Farming

But our investigative team visited land clearly demarcated as embargoed on government websites, and found grazing cows there. A worker at the ranch said that cattle were left to roam in areas employees knew were embargoed. “You can’t cut down the vegetation,” the employee said. “The vegetation grows and we work the cattle inside.” 

Santa Barbara is an enormous, powerful ranching empire, owned by the billionaire Daniel Dantas, that controls half a million hectares across Pará. In 2008 Dantas was twice arrested on bribery charges and handed a ten-year sentence as a result of a corruption investigation that also saw his land confiscated. The investigation’s findings were subsequently overturned, the sentence dropped and Dantas got all his land back. 

Over the past decade, according to Repórter Brasil, Santa Barbara has been accused of illegal deforestation and faced allegations of using slave-like labour — accusations it strongly denies. Lagoa do Triunfo is one of its largest ranches. There are 12 separate embargoed areas on it, dating from 2010 to 2013. 

With a population of 125,000 people and over two million cattle, the town of Sao Félix do Xingu, the capital of Pará state, covers an area bigger than Scotland. Cattle ranching fed its growth from remote Amazon outpost to busy town. And there is money here: farmers’ wives are happy to pay $600 for a handbag, said Kelli Moraes, a 25-year-old sales assistant. “They are very fashion.” 

Sao Félix do Xingu was mostly forest when Arlindo Rosa, now president of the town’s union of rural producers, arrived in 1993. “There was practically none of this farming … there was no highway, there was nothing,” he said. 

Cattle

“People came from outside with the spirit to raise cattle,” said his vice-president, Francisco Torres, who arrived in 1987. Santa Barbara, the region’s biggest ranching company, began buying land near Sao Félix do Xingu in 2006, Torres said.

Torres said many ranches in the area have suffered Ibama embargoes. “If they removed those embargoes, a lot would improve,” said Rosa. As is common with farmers and landowners in Amazon areas, both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls. Rosa owes $1.4 million to Ibama in fines for deforestation, according to the agency’s website.

But embargoes have not stopped Santa Barbara illegally grazing cattle on deforested land, nor JBS being able to perfectly legally do business with the company, our investigation found.

JBS Beef Brazil’s “responsible procurement policy” says it “does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests … or that are embargoed” by Ibama. But the company has also said that the common practice of transferring cattle from one farm to another for fattening can make it impossible to trace individual cows.

Official state documents seen by the Bureau, the Guardian and Repórter Brasil showed that from January to October 2018, Santa Barbara delivered at least 296 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to its Espiríto Santo ranch in Xinguara, in the same state. Between July 2018 and January this year, Santa Barbara sent 2,900 cattle from the Espiríto Santo ranch to JBS slaughterhouses. 

Ranching

Throughout 2018, Santa Barbara also sent at least 729 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to be fattened at its Porto Rico ranch in Xinguara. In April 2018, 36 cattle from the Porto Rico ranch were sent to slaughter at a JBS plant.

JBS said that 99.9 percent of its cattle purchases meet its socio-environmental criteria and that it was working to implement “a new procedure to cover all links in the supply chain” and stop the use of “cattle from illegally deforested areas”.

Santa Barbara said it did not carry out deforestation to increase its area “but rather recovers degraded areas” and turns them into pastures. It said that trees on the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch had been felled before the Forest Code was introduced and that only seven percent of the land is under embargo.

New research tracking beef cattle back to the ranches they were raised on has revealed the full extent of deforestation in the Amazon that is linked to a handful of global food corporations.

Trase, a supply chain research project developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, tracked livestock from deforested areas to abattoirs producing beef for international markets, as well as meat for domestic use. Up to 5,800 square kilometres of forest is being felled in the Amazon and other areas every year for cattle ranching.

Political

The destruction of between 280-320 sq km of forest each year is linked to JBS’s supply chain for exported beef, according to the data assembled by Trase. There is no suggestion any Lagoa do Triunfo beef is exported.

JBS, which slaughters almost 35,000 cattle in Brazil per day, has faced a string of allegations relating to deforestation. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, raided and ordered the suspension of two JBS meat-packing plants in Pará accused of having purchased cattle raised on illegally deforested land between 2013 and 2016.

JBS denied the allegations but was fined R$24.7 million ($8 million). In the same year, a Guardian investigation with Repórter Brasil revealed how the company had purchased cattle linked to poor labour conditions and deforestation, resulting in UK supermarket Waitrose removing the company’s products from its shelves. 

The findings come amid growing international concern over the looming impacts of climate change, with the Amazon forest seen by experts as a crucial buffer in stabilising regional and global climate. 

Between 1980 and 2005, Amazon deforestation levels reached 20,000 sq km per year — with an area the size of Wales being lost. Although there have been political murmurings about trying to halt the destruction, the latest data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen by 73 percent since 2012. 

Pasturelands

Erasmus zu Ermgassen, lead researcher at Trase, said: “Though some slaughterhouses monitor their direct suppliers and so in theory can avoid farms associated with deforestation, none monitor their indirect suppliers, who make up the bulk of their supply chain.”

Trase added: “There is a huge opportunity to reduce the deforestation associated with the production and exports of beef in Brazil. 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.”

Trase will release the data in full later this month.

This Article

This article is published in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and is written by Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal and Lucy Michaels in London, Dominic Phillips, André Campos and Diego Junqueira in Sao Paulo and Claire Smyth in Belfast.

The cows grazed under a hot sun near a wooden bridge spanning a river in the Amazon. The quiet was occasionally broken by a motorbike growling along a dirt road that cut through the sprawling cattle ranch.

But the idyllic pasture was on land that the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s environment agency Ibama as a punishment for deforestation. Nearby there were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and fresh salt used to feed cattle — all in apparent contravention of rules designed to protect vital rainforest.

This vast 145,000 hectare ranch is one of several owned by AgroSB Agropecuária SA — a company known in the region as Santa Barbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará, on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” — where farming eats into the rainforest. 

Fines

An investigation by the Bureau, The Guardian and Repórter Brasil has found that cattle produced by Santa Barbara are being sold to JBS, the world’s biggest meat-packing company.

JBS is the single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, and exports fresh beef to Europe and about half of the corned beef eaten in the UK. In 2017, JBS said it had stopped buying Santa Barbara cattle, after it was fined $7.7 million for buying cows raised on illegally deforested land — but our investigation shows that is no longer the case.

The investigation found that last year the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to some of Santa Barbara’s other farms for the final stage of fattening. Cattle was then sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants. Using GPS and publicly available maps and locations, reporters located cattle and pasture inside embargoed areas at Lagoa do Triunfo. 

The revelations come as work by Trase, an NGO, shared exclusively with our team, has revealed how huge swathes of felled rainforest can be traced back to this cattle trade — and how beef raised on deforested land ends up in international supply chains.

Embargoes — restrictions that ban farmers guilty of deforestation or environmental damage from using parts of their own land — are imposed by the Brazilian government and serve both as a punishment and a protective measure to allow land to recover. They can be more effective than fines because they come at a higher cost for farmers. 

Farming

But our investigative team visited land clearly demarcated as embargoed on government websites, and found grazing cows there. A worker at the ranch said that cattle were left to roam in areas employees knew were embargoed. “You can’t cut down the vegetation,” the employee said. “The vegetation grows and we work the cattle inside.” 

Santa Barbara is an enormous, powerful ranching empire, owned by the billionaire Daniel Dantas, that controls half a million hectares across Pará. In 2008 Dantas was twice arrested on bribery charges and handed a ten-year sentence as a result of a corruption investigation that also saw his land confiscated. The investigation’s findings were subsequently overturned, the sentence dropped and Dantas got all his land back. 

Over the past decade, according to Repórter Brasil, Santa Barbara has been accused of illegal deforestation and faced allegations of using slave-like labour — accusations it strongly denies. Lagoa do Triunfo is one of its largest ranches. There are 12 separate embargoed areas on it, dating from 2010 to 2013. 

With a population of 125,000 people and over two million cattle, the town of Sao Félix do Xingu, the capital of Pará state, covers an area bigger than Scotland. Cattle ranching fed its growth from remote Amazon outpost to busy town. And there is money here: farmers’ wives are happy to pay $600 for a handbag, said Kelli Moraes, a 25-year-old sales assistant. “They are very fashion.” 

Sao Félix do Xingu was mostly forest when Arlindo Rosa, now president of the town’s union of rural producers, arrived in 1993. “There was practically none of this farming … there was no highway, there was nothing,” he said. 

Cattle

“People came from outside with the spirit to raise cattle,” said his vice-president, Francisco Torres, who arrived in 1987. Santa Barbara, the region’s biggest ranching company, began buying land near Sao Félix do Xingu in 2006, Torres said.

Torres said many ranches in the area have suffered Ibama embargoes. “If they removed those embargoes, a lot would improve,” said Rosa. As is common with farmers and landowners in Amazon areas, both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls. Rosa owes $1.4 million to Ibama in fines for deforestation, according to the agency’s website.

But embargoes have not stopped Santa Barbara illegally grazing cattle on deforested land, nor JBS being able to perfectly legally do business with the company, our investigation found.

JBS Beef Brazil’s “responsible procurement policy” says it “does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests … or that are embargoed” by Ibama. But the company has also said that the common practice of transferring cattle from one farm to another for fattening can make it impossible to trace individual cows.

Official state documents seen by the Bureau, the Guardian and Repórter Brasil showed that from January to October 2018, Santa Barbara delivered at least 296 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to its Espiríto Santo ranch in Xinguara, in the same state. Between July 2018 and January this year, Santa Barbara sent 2,900 cattle from the Espiríto Santo ranch to JBS slaughterhouses. 

Ranching

Throughout 2018, Santa Barbara also sent at least 729 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to be fattened at its Porto Rico ranch in Xinguara. In April 2018, 36 cattle from the Porto Rico ranch were sent to slaughter at a JBS plant.

JBS said that 99.9 percent of its cattle purchases meet its socio-environmental criteria and that it was working to implement “a new procedure to cover all links in the supply chain” and stop the use of “cattle from illegally deforested areas”.

Santa Barbara said it did not carry out deforestation to increase its area “but rather recovers degraded areas” and turns them into pastures. It said that trees on the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch had been felled before the Forest Code was introduced and that only seven percent of the land is under embargo.

New research tracking beef cattle back to the ranches they were raised on has revealed the full extent of deforestation in the Amazon that is linked to a handful of global food corporations.

Trase, a supply chain research project developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, tracked livestock from deforested areas to abattoirs producing beef for international markets, as well as meat for domestic use. Up to 5,800 square kilometres of forest is being felled in the Amazon and other areas every year for cattle ranching.

Political

The destruction of between 280-320 sq km of forest each year is linked to JBS’s supply chain for exported beef, according to the data assembled by Trase. There is no suggestion any Lagoa do Triunfo beef is exported.

JBS, which slaughters almost 35,000 cattle in Brazil per day, has faced a string of allegations relating to deforestation. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, raided and ordered the suspension of two JBS meat-packing plants in Pará accused of having purchased cattle raised on illegally deforested land between 2013 and 2016.

JBS denied the allegations but was fined R$24.7 million ($8 million). In the same year, a Guardian investigation with Repórter Brasil revealed how the company had purchased cattle linked to poor labour conditions and deforestation, resulting in UK supermarket Waitrose removing the company’s products from its shelves. 

The findings come amid growing international concern over the looming impacts of climate change, with the Amazon forest seen by experts as a crucial buffer in stabilising regional and global climate. 

Between 1980 and 2005, Amazon deforestation levels reached 20,000 sq km per year — with an area the size of Wales being lost. Although there have been political murmurings about trying to halt the destruction, the latest data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen by 73 percent since 2012. 

Pasturelands

Erasmus zu Ermgassen, lead researcher at Trase, said: “Though some slaughterhouses monitor their direct suppliers and so in theory can avoid farms associated with deforestation, none monitor their indirect suppliers, who make up the bulk of their supply chain.”

Trase added: “There is a huge opportunity to reduce the deforestation associated with the production and exports of beef in Brazil. 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.”

Trase will release the data in full later this month.

This Article

This article is published in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is is written by Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal and Lucy Michaels in London, Dominic Phillips, André Campos and Diego Junqueira in Sao Paulo and Claire Smyth in Belfast.

If you eat meat, you probably buy products made by one Brazilian company. A company with such influence it can impact climate change, openly admit to having bribed more than 1,000 politicians, and continue to grow despite scandal after scandal. And you’ve probably never heard of it.

Welcome to a world where meat is the new hot commodity, controlled by just a handful of gigantic firms which together wield unprecedented control over global food production. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been investigating the biggest of all: JBS, a Brazilian company which slaughters a staggering 13 million animals every single day and has annual revenue of $50bn.

When it comes to scandals, you can take your pick — during its rapid rise to become the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS and its network of subsidiaries have been linked to allegations of high-level corruption, modern-day “slave labour” practices, illegal deforestation, fleecing farmers, animal welfare violations and major hygiene breaches.

In 2017 its holding company agreed to pay one of the biggest fines in global corporate history — $3.2bn — after admitting bribing hundreds of politicians. Yet the company’s products remain on supermarket shelves across the world, and its global dominance only looks set to grow further.

In a two-part investigation published today, the Bureau revealed in partnership with The Guardian and Repórter Brasil that Amazon deforestation and dirty meat are very much part of how JBS has done business. Today we lift the lid on the company itself, and ask: what is the true cost of cheap meat?

A briefcase full of cash

Brazilians traders call May 17, 2017 “Joesley Day” — the date on which the power and influence of Brazil’s meat industry was exposed in all its ugly glory and gave the stock market a sucker punch.

Joesley Batista, one of two brothers who control JBS, secretly recorded President Michel Temer apparently ordering the payment of bribes to a notoriously corrupt politician who was serving a prison sentence for graft.

Details of the recording, made as part of a plea bargain deal Joesley and his brother Wesley had signed arising from their own corruption investigation, were published by a leading Brazilian newspaper.

The investigation also uncovered footage of a Temer aide carrying a suitcase containing nearly $150,000, allegedly handed over by JBS. Ricardo Saud, a JBS executive, subsequently testified the company had bribed 1,829 candidates from across the political spectrum, spending almost $250m.

“It was the rule of the game. And what’s most important, corruption was on the upper floor, with the authorities,” Joesley said in an interview. At the time he was CEO of J&F Investments, the family empire’s holding company.

The day after Joesley Day, the Brazilian stock market plunged nearly nine percent in its worst collapse in nine years. Temer is thought to have only survived by upping budgets to individual lawmakers and making concessions to Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby.

That JBS’s activities could tank Brazil’s stock market and threaten to topple the government was a stark illustration of how far their company had come from its beginnings as a one-man operation.

JBS was founded in 1953 by Joesley and Wesley’s father, José Batista Sobrinho, who was a cattle rancher in the central western city of Anápolis. José would buy cattle from farmers to resell onto meat packers in the central western state of Goias, before opening a butchers shop with his brother.

“My older brother would buy cattle and I would slaughter it,” says José in this video telling the history of JBS. “My merchandise stood out. We only used top-class cattle … Things took off real quick.”

A few years later, the pair saw an opportunity in the creation of Brazil’s new capital of Brasilia 125 miles away. They established a slaughterhouse which supplied meat to workers building the city.

The business quickly grew, but remained very much a family affair. All three of José’s sons dropped out of school aged 17 to manage different slaughterhouses, according to a Forbes profile, and the 1980s saw JBS expand rapidly throughout Brazil. It acquired a string of slaughterhouses and processing factories, and began exporting fresh beef — primarily cuts not widely used in Brazil. In 2007, JBS SA, its Brazilian arm, became a publicly held company.

Around the same time a national policy was introduced that propelled JBS to new heights. Brazil’s national bank BNDES began its “national champions scheme”, choosing several Brazilian companies and investing in them heavily with the stated aim of turning them into successful multinational corporations.

BNDES first invested about $560m in JBS 2007, accelerating an international acquisition spree which saw the company buy up meat-packing businesses across the Americas, including in the US. It later bought the major Northern Ireland poultry firm Moy Park. BNDES also invested $2bn in 2009 as JBS bought the US chicken corporation Pilgrim’s Pride. The bank today owns just over a fifth of JBS.

The national champions policy certainly paid off for JBS, which rapidly became the world’s biggest producer and exporter of meat.

In 2016 JBS made $20 billion more in food sales than the second largest meat multinational — the US firm Tyson Foods — according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a US thinktank.

The journalist Raquel Landim, whose book, Why Not, charts the startling growth of JBS, described Wesley Batista as a smart manager with a close eye for detail and the more flamboyant Joesley as the risk-taker. “Joesley is very intelligent,” she said. In her opinion “he has no scruples”.

As JBS rose, Joesley bought a yacht, a Lamborghini and luxury apartments in New York and married the television presenter Ticiana Villas Boas in a sumptuous ceremony at company headquarters in Sao Paulo.

The scale of JBS’s operations today is stunning: the company employs more than 900,000 people globally, has revenues of $50bn and has customers in 150 countries. In 2018, JBS slaughtered some 77,000 cattle, 116,000 pigs and 13.6 million poultry birds every day.

“It’s a joy to see it grow,” says José Batista Sobrinho in the company video, as aerial images of thousands of cattle in feedlots play behind the subtitles. “It’s a whole new world now!”

The scandal portfolio

The secret to the company’s success, say Batistas from both generations, is that they work harder than anyone else. Others point to its network of subsidiaries in different countries, which allows it to weather storms in the market and get around particular trade restrictions — for instance when the European Union restricted Brazilian beef in 2008, JBS used its Australian subsidiary to continue exports, reported Forbes.

But for Brazilians, certain words may spring to mind when pondering JBS’s success: Car Wash, Weak Flesh, Capitu, Bullish. These are the operation names for massive investigations that have taken place into the actions of JBS or its controllers. The company has been touched by allegations of scandal after scandal over the years, while its growth has continued unabated.

Corruption accusations

The scale of allegations of bribery against JBS stretches from meat inspectors to the highest office in Brazil: Temer, the aide, and the $150,000 briefcase.

Operation Car Wash was set up to investigate the bribery scandal that engulfed the Brazilian oil firm Petrobras in 2014. An astonishing network was revealed, stretching far beyond a single company and ultimately bringing down the Brazilian government.

Agriculture has long held sway over Brazilian politics — many lawmakers are farmers — but Operation Car Wash suggested that influence was backed by systemic graft. When the scandal reached JBS’s holding company, Joesley and Wesley Batista, along with five other executives, signed a plea deal in May 2017, admitting bribery of politicians.

Four months later the brothers were arrested on allegations of insider trading. In November last year, Joesley Batista was arrested again, accused of bribing officials in 2014. Even now, the Batistas’ holding company is under investigation over potential involvement in alleged collusion between executives, politicians and public servants to divert resources from a government-owned bank.

“Dirty” meat

The company has also come under fire over “dirty meat.” In 2017, JBS was caught up in a major scandal; police claimed inspectors had been bribed to allow the sale of rotten beef, falsified export and other documents, and had deliberately failed to properly inspect meat plants.

The resulting inquiry, Operation Weak Flesh, led to an EU embargo being placed on meat products produced at some Brazilian meat plants, and enhanced checks on meat and poultry imports. 60 people have been charged in connection with the inquiry — which covers much of the Brazilian meat industry — over the past two years, and investigations are ongoing.

And it’s not just beef. A Bureau, Guardian and Reporter Brasil investigation published this week showed millions of chickens contaminated with salmonella, including some supplied by JBS, have been exported from Brazil to Europe, including up to a million to the UK, over the past two years.

JBS said that Operation Weak Flesh had not “called into question the quality standard of its products”, and that the company followed EU standards when exporting chicken to Europe.

“Slave labour” allegations

In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and Repórter Brasil found JBS had bought beef from a farm that was under investigation by Brazilian prosecutors for using workers in conditions described as being like “modern-day slavery”. Documents said police had found men forced to live in conditions described as inhumane and degrading, with inadequate shelter, toilets or drinking water.

Waitrose pulled JBS-supplied corned beef off the shelves following the story. JBS said it immediately stopped buying beef from the farm in question following the police raids and “does not buy cattle from any farms which have any association with slave labour, as listed by the Brazilian government”.

Animal cruelty

Also in 2017, an investigation by the Humane Society of the United States claimed undercover researchers had seen chickens being punched and beaten with iron rods at a farm and an abattoir contracted to Pilgrim’s Pride, one of JBS’s subsidiaries. Another animal rights group, Mercy for Animals, released video footage the following year that it said showed workers at a JBS supplier beating piglets and ripping off their testicles without anaesthesia.

JBS said in a statement that it suspended shipments from that pig supplier site and had started an investigation, and that it did not condone or participate in any type of animal abuse. Pilgrim’s Pride also launched an investigation, suspending supply from at least one of the farms.

Price fixing

In recent years, multiple lawsuits have been filed in the US accusing JBS and other major meatpacking firms of colluding to fix prices. The US opened a criminal investigation into the allegations against the JBS-owned Pilgrim’s Pride and other poultry producers late last month.

Last year the country’s two biggest food distributors, Sysco Corp and US Foods Holding Corp, claimed major poultry producers had deliberately cut off the supply of chicken in order to drive up wholesale prices. It was the third lawsuit making such allegations in two years.

And in April this year, a lawsuit filed by independent cattle ranchers accused JBS and three other major US beefpackers of colluding since 2015 to drive down the prices they paid farmers for their meat.

Deforestation

JBS has repeatedly been accused of buying cattle raised on illegally deforested Amazon land. In 2017 the company was fined $7.7m by Brazil’s environmental regulator for buying cattle from ranchers operating on blacklisted land. Greenpeace has released multiple reports making similar allegations, which the company has always vigorously denied.

Our latest investigation shows companies illegally raising cattle on deforested land are still supplying JBS. Reporters visited a farm and saw cows grazing in embargoed areas at a ranch belonging to a company known as Santa Barbara, and saw official state documents confirming cattle from that ranch were delivered to sites which supply JBS slaughterhouses.

In response, JBS said that 99.9 percent of its cattle purchases meet its socio-environmental criteria. It also said that it was working to implement “a new procedure to cover all links in the supply chain” and stop the use of “cattle from illegally deforested areas”.

The British connection

After every scandal regulators have attempted to take action against JBS, but nothing seems to stunt its growth. The EU has in the past temporarily restricted Brazilian beef; JBS products have occasionally been pulled from supermarket shelves. But when one arm of the business is affected, another fills the gap. If you live in the UK, there probably isn’t any JBS beef in your freezer, but check your chicken.

Like JBS, Moy Park is not a name consumers will recognise, yet it is one of Britain’s biggest food companies and supplies more than a quarter of the chicken we eat.

In a story echoing that of the Batistas, the company started out as a small farming enterprise in the 1940s. But over the past decade an aggressive growth strategy has seen it establish a near monopoly on Northern Ireland poultry production.

By 2015 the company was slaughtering five million birds a week. That same year it was bought by JBS for £900m, which took over an ambitious programme of farm construction across the UK.

With investment of about £200m, Moy Park’s dramatic expansion plan involved building hundreds more poultry houses in Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK.

The extra farms enabled another surge in production. Last year the company posted record figures of six million birds slaughtered each week, hailed as a milestone by company executives.

The company is now Northern Ireland’s largest private sector business, with a reported turnover of £1.5bn in 2017, supplying virtually all of the major UK supermarket chains, as well as McDonalds and KFC.

Moy Park in numbers

6m

Chickens slaughtered each week

30%

Proportion of UK chickens produced by Moy Park

£1.6B

Turnover in 2017

Yet Moy Park has itself not been immune to scandal. Since 2015 Moy Park has been fined more than £1m for a series of infractions, including subjecting chickens to “unnecessary pain and distress”, failure to pay workers the minimum wage, and unsafe work systems that led one employee to suffer life-changing injuries in an accident.

There’s vast wastage, and at abattoirs birds arrive unfit for human consumption. Last year, in slaughterhouses across Northern Ireland, almost 3 million chickens and other birds were plucked off production lines by meat inspectors. Due to its dominance of the market, a significant number of them will likely have come from Moy Park farms.

Diseased, emaciated or injured — many suffering fractures, bruising or dislocations — dead on arrival, contaminated, or damaged by machines during slaughter, the birds were disposed of. From 2016 to 2018, almost 8 million birds were disposed of.

As recently as last week, Moy Park was accused of keeping animals in “horrifying conditions”, after secretly filmed footage at three Moy Park farms in Lincolnshire showed chickens that were lame, struggling to breathe and surrounded by dead birds.

Responding to the recent story, published by the Guardian, a company spokesperson said: “We have a zero-tolerance attitude toward anything that jeopardises the health and welfare of our birds and we are fully investigating these allegations.”

Corporate meat

Though it is by far the biggest, JBS is not the only meat giant. With global meat consumption expected to skyrocket in the coming years, and with some estimates suggesting that the combined meat, poultry and seafood industries globally could be worth $7 trillion by 2025, meat has become the new global commodity, joining such staples as oil, corn, soya, steel and gold in keeping the world moving.

Yet while corporate dominance in other key agri-commodity markets — grain, seeds, chemicals — is better understood, allowing for enhanced scrutiny and public debate, the same is not true of the meat sector.

Many of the companies controlling the trade are little known outside of industry circles, often obscured behind brand names or supplying raw ingredients to supermarket chains, fast food outlets or wholesaler catering firms.

Ranchers in Brazil – João Laet

In the UK, just a handful of companies — of which many are subsidiaries of overseas corporations — now control large swathes of the meat sector: Dunbia, Dawn Meats and ABP dominate the beef sector.  2 Sisters Food Group, Faccenda, Cargill — as well as Moy Park — run the show on poultry.

Globally, it’s a similar picture with a clutch of multinational firms doing much of the rearing, slaughter, processing and supplying of red meat and poultry internationally — among them Tyson, Smithfield Foods, BRF, Vion, Cargill, and of course JBS.

With a spiralling global population, a climate emergency and widespread hunger in large parts of the world, what we eat, how we produce it, and — crucially — who produces it, matters. The supply of safe food, free from disease, sustainably produced and fairly priced, is vital for both food security and public health.

JBS began as a local butcher’s shop; now its beef travels thousands of miles from Brazil to UK supermarkets. That journey clouds the link between farm and plate and makes it almost impossible for the average consumer to understand where their food comes from — and how big a price the planet is paying the price for their cheap meat.

This Article

This article is published in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is is written by Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal and Lucy Michaels in London, Dominic Phillips, André Campos and Diego Junqueira in Sao Paulo and Claire Smyth in Belfast.

Edible insects could be a solution to avoiding a global food crisis if consumers can overcome barriers such as the “ick factor”, a new study has found.

Insects are an environmentally sustainable food source, with a significantly lower carbon footprint compared to meat production, the report published in the Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety journal revealed.

But attitudes towards eating insects and current farming techniques and technologies need to change if edible insects are to become a common food source, researchers from the University of Leeds and the University of Veracruz, in Mexico, said.

Farming

The report found that edible insect cultivation remains rare in Western countries, where eating insects is still considered unusual, while negative perceptions have taken root in some countries where insects have been eaten traditionally, with the younger population associating it with poverty.

The best way of normalising edible insects is to target the preferences of the younger generation, who showed interest in using edible insects in unrecognisable forms, such as in flour or powder used in cookies or energy drinks, the authors said.

Another successful strategy to making edible insects become part of the mainstream is to serve them as snacks between meals, the report found.

The study, Edible Insects Processing: Traditional and Innovative Technologies, was carried out as worldwide food security faces serious risks, including the rapidly changing climate and an expanding global population.

The authors reviewed current insect farming methods, processing technologies, commercialisation techniques and current perceptions towards entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.

Sustainable

They revealed that edible insects have a high nutritional value and are a viable option as a sustainable source of protein.

Insect farming, which can be carried out in urban areas, uses much smaller amounts of land, water and feed and produces far fewer greenhouse gases compared to meat production.

But, if edible insects are to become a common food source, more development is needed to make the leap from wild harvesting to large-scale indoor farming that could meet demand in an economically efficient, safe and sustainable manner, the study found.

Dr Alan-Javier Hernandez-Alvarez, one of the study’s authors, from the School of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds, said: “Edible insects are fascinating. Although humans have eaten insects throughout history, and approximately two billion people around the globe regularly eat them today, research on the subject is relatively new.

“Edible insects could be the solution to the problem of how to meet the growing global demand for food in a sustainable way.

Food

“The ‘ick factor’ remains one of the biggest barriers to edible insects becoming the norm. Eating behaviour is shaped largely during early childhood and in Western countries, eating insects, especially in whole and recognisable forms, remains something seen mostly on TV shows.”

Dr Guiomar Melgar-Lalanne, study author from the University of Veracruz, added: “In Western countries it is the younger generation that show more willingness to try new food products, including edible insects.

“The ‘foodies boom’ and the rise of veganism and flexitarians have opened the door to alternative food sources.

“Promoting insects as an environmentally sustainable protein source appeals to the current attitudes in the younger generation.”

She continued: “But if edible insects are to become a common food source, current farming techniques and technologies could struggle with the demand and need to be expanded.”

This Author

Amy Murphy is a reporter with PA. 

Edible insects could be a solution to avoiding a global food crisis if consumers can overcome barriers such as the “ick factor”, a new study has found.

Insects are an environmentally sustainable food source, with a significantly lower carbon footprint compared to meat production, the report published in the Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety journal revealed.

But attitudes towards eating insects and current farming techniques and technologies need to change if edible insects are to become a common food source, researchers from the University of Leeds and the University of Veracruz, in Mexico, said.

Farming

The report found that edible insect cultivation remains rare in Western countries, where eating insects is still considered unusual, while negative perceptions have taken root in some countries where insects have been eaten traditionally, with the younger population associating it with poverty.

The best way of normalising edible insects is to target the preferences of the younger generation, who showed interest in using edible insects in unrecognisable forms, such as in flour or powder used in cookies or energy drinks, the authors said.

Another successful strategy to making edible insects become part of the mainstream is to serve them as snacks between meals, the report found.

The study, Edible Insects Processing: Traditional and Innovative Technologies, was carried out as worldwide food security faces serious risks, including the rapidly changing climate and an expanding global population.

The authors reviewed current insect farming methods, processing technologies, commercialisation techniques and current perceptions towards entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.

Sustainable

They revealed that edible insects have a high nutritional value and are a viable option as a sustainable source of protein.

Insect farming, which can be carried out in urban areas, uses much smaller amounts of land, water and feed and produces far fewer greenhouse gases compared to meat production.

But, if edible insects are to become a common food source, more development is needed to make the leap from wild harvesting to large-scale indoor farming that could meet demand in an economically efficient, safe and sustainable manner, the study found.

Dr Alan-Javier Hernandez-Alvarez, one of the study’s authors, from the School of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds, said: “Edible insects are fascinating. Although humans have eaten insects throughout history, and approximately two billion people around the globe regularly eat them today, research on the subject is relatively new.

“Edible insects could be the solution to the problem of how to meet the growing global demand for food in a sustainable way.

Food

“The ‘ick factor’ remains one of the biggest barriers to edible insects becoming the norm. Eating behaviour is shaped largely during early childhood and in Western countries, eating insects, especially in whole and recognisable forms, remains something seen mostly on TV shows.”

Dr Guiomar Melgar-Lalanne, study author from the University of Veracruz, added: “In Western countries it is the younger generation that show more willingness to try new food products, including edible insects.

“The ‘foodies boom’ and the rise of veganism and flexitarians have opened the door to alternative food sources.

“Promoting insects as an environmentally sustainable protein source appeals to the current attitudes in the younger generation.”

She continued: “But if edible insects are to become a common food source, current farming techniques and technologies could struggle with the demand and need to be expanded.”

This Author

Amy Murphy is a reporter with PA.