Is your beef linked to Amazon deforestation? A report highlights loopholes

The world’s largest meat company, JBS, has allegedly fuelled illegal deforestation, land grabs and human rights abuses in the Brazilian Amazon by sourcing cattle from ranches operating inside protected areas, according to a new Human Rights Watch investigation.

On Wednesday, the nonprofit issued an 86-page report focusing on the state of Pará, where the United Nations will hold its annual climate change summit, COP30, next month.

The report highlights a gap in JBS’s supply chain: Human Rights Watch claims the meat company does not track its indirect cattle suppliers.

Investigators found that cattle raised on illegally deforested land were moved through a “laundering” system that concealed their origins before they reached JBS.

That, in turn, means JBS cannot guarantee that its beef or leather products are not contributing to deforestation and related abuses.

Without a better system for tracing livestock, JBS will continue to be “unable to root out illegal cattle ranches”, according to Luciana Téllez, a senior environment researcher at Human Rights Watch.

And what JBS does not know could make it responsible for bankrolling illegal ranches that clear-cut the Amazon, she explained.

“We cannot say with 100-percent certainty that the cattle that JBS purchased from its direct suppliers are the same ones that are coming from illegal cattle ranches, but neither can JBS,” Téllez told Al Jazeera.

“That’s a problem, because they are responsible for what they are procuring.”

A deforestation hotspot

Wednesday’s report is part of an ever-growing body of literature delving into the impact agriculture has had on the Amazon rainforest.

The construction of ranches and farmland is considered the single biggest direct cause of deforestation in the world’s tropical regions.

The Amazon rainforest is no exception. In recent years, cattle ranching has emerged as a primary culprit in the levelling of its tangled, biodiverse jungles.

The northern state of Pará is key to the fight against further loss. It has consistently recorded the highest levels of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since 2016.

In 2024 alone, 17,195 square kilometres (6,639 sq miles) of forest in the state were degraded, a 421-percent increase over the previous year, according to Human Rights Watch.

The state also reports the second-largest number of land conflicts in Brazil, with illegal ranchers, farmers and criminal groups seeking to invade protected land.

For Indigenous and traditional communities that consider the Amazon home, these invasions have been devastating. Residents have seen their crops destroyed, the forest burned, and their lives displaced.

In some cases, community members have even been threatened, attacked or killed after denouncing the land grabs.

Though federal law prohibits such activity, some land-grabbers have succeeded in fraudulently registering protected rainforest as private properties.

Wednesday’s report documented encroachments in two protected areas: the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous territory and the Terra Nossa sustainable development area.

“The level of violence and intimidation by land grabbers in Terra Nossa is truly frightening, and the absolute impunity they’ve enjoyed for years is astonishing,” Tellez told Al Jazeera.

Human Rights Watch said that Pará’s state animal health agency, Adepará, had registered ranches in both tracts of land. It also authorised the transportation of cattle in and out of the two areas.

According to the report, Adepará claimed that it has not historically been tasked with observing environmental criteria when authorising livestock movements.

But with the state agency’s approval, Human Rights Watch said cattle were raised illegally inside the protected rainforest zones and then transferred out to other ranches.

From there, they could reach major slaughterhouses, including JBS facilities.

Each transfer helped obscure the cattle’s illegal origin, effectively laundering the animals into the meat trade.

A traceability gap

Part of the problem, according to Human Rights Watch, is Brazil’s system for tracking livestock.

Brazil does not keep full histories of individual animals. Instead, their movements are documented with “animal transit permits”, known as Guias de Trânsito Animal or GTAs.

Those permits collect information about overall shipments of animals: the number of cattle involved, plus data about the sex and the age of those in the group.

But without an individual record for every cow, calf and bull, it is difficult, if not impossible, to trace their origins.

In an April filing to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, JBS acknowledged the loopholes in how the GTA system traces cattle.

“As a result, there can be no assurance that available monitoring procedures can ensure that the origin of any head of cattle was in full compliance with applicable laws,” JBS wrote.

The company has promised to require its suppliers to declare their suppliers by 2026. Yet, Human Rights Watch says it remains unclear how such information would be verified or enforced.

“The best solution is for the federal government itself to institute a traceability mechanism for cattle across Brazil,” Tellez said. “The Brazilian government is moving towards that, but it’s moving extremely slowly.”

JBS also made a similar commitment more than a decade and a half ago. In 2009, the company signed the G4 Cattle Agreement with environmental group Greenpeace, pledging to identify all its indirect suppliers by 2011. It failed to meet that deadline.

“It’s unacceptable that companies such as JBS have not fulfilled the promises that they made in the past,” Cristiane Mazzetti, a forest campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Brazil, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s something that now governments need to reflect upon and regulate in a more stringent way, because only believing in voluntary corporate commitments is not going to deliver.”

JBS did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by publication.

Regulatory failures and slow reform

But reform may be on the horizon. In 2023, Pará’s governor introduced a decree requiring all animal movements in the state to be fully traceable by the end of 2026.

At the federal level, the Ministry of Agriculture announced a similar plan in December 2024, mandating that all states implement tracking systems by 2032.

However, Human Rights Watch warns that this timeline is too slow and could allow illegal ranching to persist for years.

Experts and advocacy groups say that Brazil should take immediate steps, including by making GTA data publicly accessible. Such measures would help law enforcement agencies identify fraudulent movements and trace cattle back to illegal ranches.

“Companies struggle with traceability, firstly because they have minimal access to public data on the production chain,” said Lisandro Inakake, an agronomist with the Brazilian environmental nonprofit Imaflora.

He added that the struggle is compounded “because there are no universal market requirements covering all of the companies’ operations”.

While Human Rights Watch has called on JBS to voluntarily start tracing the lifespan of its cattle, Mazzetti, the Greenpeace campaigner, believes more decisive action is necessary if deforestation is to be stopped.

“It’s not time for new promises,” she said. “It’s time to be held accountable for all the impacts that their supply chain generated in the Amazon, in other ecosystems, and also on the climate.”