The cows grazed under the midday Amazon sun, near a wooden bridge spanning a river. It was an idyllic scene of pastoral quiet, occasionally broken by a motorbike growling on the dirt road that cuts through part of the Lagoa do Triunfo cattle farm to a nearby community.
However, this pasture is land that the farm has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) for illegal deforestation. Nearby were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs and salt for cattle.
The vast 145,000 hectare farm is one of several owned by the company AgroSB Agropecuaria SA — 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 state of Para on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” — where farming eats into the rainforest. To get there takes hours of driving along dirt roads and a ferry ride from nearby Sao Felix do Xingu, a cattle town accessible only by airplane until a few decades ago.
Illustration: Louise Ting
AgroSB supplies cattle to JBS, the world’s biggest meat packing company and single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, with 350,000 customers in more than 150 countries.
The Lagoa do Triunfo farm last year delivered hundreds of heads of cattle for fattening to other farms also owned by AgroSB, with cattle from those farms being sent to slaughter in JBS plants, an investigation showed.
Embargoes are imposed for environmental breaches, such as farmers or landowners cutting down trees and deforesting illegally, and serve both as a punishment and protective measure to allow land to recover. From 2010 to 2013, at least 12 areas of land on Lagoa do Triunfo were embargoed, and IBAMA fined AgroSB more than US$18 million at the current exchange rate for deforestation on the Lagoa do Triunfo farm.
Our investigative team visited land clearly demarcated as embargoed on government Web sites, and found cows grazing there.
A farm worker said that cattle were allowed to roam in areas that employees knew were embargoed.
“You can’t cut down the vegetation,” the employee said. “The vegetation grows and we work the cattle inside.”
The employee’s name is being withheld in case of retaliation.
Work by Stockholm-based non-governmental organization TRASE, seen exclusively by our team, this week reveals the extent to which the international demand for beef is driving deforestation, with thousands of hectares of the Amazon being felled every year to provide meat for world markets.
AgroSB is a powerful farming empire owned by the Opportunity financial group, cofounded by Daniel Dantas, a controversial businessman that Bloomberg described as the “bad boy” of Brazilian finance. The group owns half a million hectares across Para and has long attracted controversy.
Over the past decade, AgroSB has been accused of illegal deforestation, keeping workers in slave-like conditions and spraying a community occupying one of its farms with pesticides — accusations it has strongly denied.
Scandal has also surrounded JBS, which is supplied by AgroSB. In 2017, following an IBAMA investigation, the meat company was fined US$7.7 million for buying cattle from farms with embargoed areas, including another farm owned by AgroSB. The company pledged to stop buying cattle from the farm.
That same year, Joesley Batista, CEO of its controlling company, almost brought down the government of then-Brazilian president Michel Temer after secretly recording him appearing to endorse bribery — Temer was indicted, but never tried and has always denied the charges, claiming that the recording was edited. Joesley and his brother Wesley, then JBS CEO, admitted to an extensive web of bribery in a plea bargain deal.
An AgroSB spokesman said in an e-mail that any deforestation had occurred before the company acquired Lagoa do Triunfo in 2008.
“AgroSB does not carry out deforestation to increase its area, but rather it recovers degraded areas. This brings social and environmental progress for all, because in the same area it is possible to produce more, without deforestation, in respect to the environment,” the spokesman said.
“AgroSB’s business model is anchored in the acquisition of degraded open and pastured areas, which are fertilized, reclaimed and transformed into high-intensity pastures or grain plantations — which increases food production per hectare and also captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the plantations and in more than 250,000 hectares of forest (legal reserve) maintained on its properties,” he added.
“There is no irregularity in the marketing/transfer of livestock,” the spokesman said.
Only 7 percent of the farm was embargoed, he said, adding that as AgroSB has been successful in appealing against some of the other embargoes on its land, the company believes that it would also overturn the embargoes on Lagoa do Triunfo.
With a population of 125,000 and more than 2 million cattle, the town of Sao Felix do Xingu covers an area bigger than Scotland. Cattle farming fed its growth from a remote Amazon outpost to a busy town, and there are clear signs of wealth there.
Just outside of the town, big money was being splashed at a horse racing meet in a field full of 4x4s. As two jockeys spurred their horses down the rudimentary race track, a commentator bellowed and men waved wads of cash as their bets came in.
There was more than US$35,000 in prizes over two days of racing, said Valdiron Bueno, owner of two agricultural supply shops and the race organizer.
Bueno built his business more than 20 years after arriving in town with just the clothes on his back.
“It wasn’t easy. I cried a lot,” he said.
Sao Felix 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.
“People came from outside with the spirit to raise cattle,” said his vice president, Francisco Torres, who arrived in 1987.
Both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls.
Torres criticized IBAMA as a “fines industry,” borrowing a phrase from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has dismantled environment protection and enjoys support from farmers like these.
“How are you going to work if you can’t deforest an area, principally a small one?” Rosa said.
However, the embargoes do not appear to have affected AgroSB’s business.
“The facts pointed out do not correspond to the standards and processes adopted by the company,” a JBS spokesman said, indicating an independent audit from last year showing that “more than 99.9 percent of JBS’ cattle purchases meet the company’s socio-environmental criteria and the Public Livestock Commitment” — a deal signed between big cattle companies and Greenpeace in 2009. It was followed in 2011 by an agreement that JBS and other meat companies signed with federal prosecutors not to buy cattle directly from embargoed or illegally deforested areas.
“JBS has a responsible purchase policy for raw materials and does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous reserves or environmental conservation areas, or that are embargoed by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources,” a spokesman said in an e-mail.
The independent audit found that the company had made impressive progress in tightening up procedures and shutting out farms with areas embargoed by IBAMA.
However, although the system excludes farms that have embargoed areas, the audit said that other farms owned by the same company might still sell to JBS.
“Indirect suppliers of cattle to JBS are not yet checked systematically, since JBS has not yet managed to adopt auditable procedures for its indirect suppliers,” the audit said.
Official state documents showed that from January to October last year, Santa Barbara delivered at least 296 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo farm to its Espirito Santo farm in Xinguara, in the same state.
From July to December last year, Santa Barbara sent at least 1,977 cattle from the Espirito Santo farm to two JBS slaughterhouses in Para. In January, at least 936 cattle were sent from the Espirito Santo farm to a JBS slaughterhouse in Redencao in Para.
Throughout last year, Santa Barbara also sent at least 729 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo farm to be fattened at its Porto Rico farm in Xinguara. In April last year, 36 cattle from the Porto Rico farm were sent to slaughter at a JBS plant in Tucuma in Para.
Growing international demand for beef has become a key driver in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, with new figures revealing the full extent of deforestation directly linked to a handful of major food corporations. Beef linked to deforestation is exported globally, including to key markets in East Asia and Europe.
An investigation by TRASE has uncovered how up to 5,800 square kilometers of forest is being felled in the Amazon and other areas annually to be converted into pasture used for cattle farming, with livestock from deforested areas found to be supplying slaughterhouses producing beef for global markets.
Companies in JBS’ supply chain are potentially responsible for the destruction of 28,000 to 32,000 hectares of forest each year for exported beef, according to data assembled by TRASE.
There is no suggestion that Lagoa do Triunfo beef is exported.
AgroSB said that they purchased the land in 2008, after the deforestation had already happened.
JBS said that it has “one of the largest private supplier monitoring systems in the world... which covers the legal Amazon region.”
It has been working on the GTA-Verde concept, which would cover all links in the supply chain and “prevent the entry of cattle from illegally deforested areas into the meat industry.”
Data showed that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been on the rise since 2012. From August 2017 to July last year, about 7,900 square kilometers was destroyed.
In the most comprehensive study of its kind, TRASE used customs, agricultural, sanitary inspection and deforestation data to map Brazilian cattle exports from the international markets that consume them back to the more than 3,000 municipalities where the cattle were raised.
The analysis includes data on “indirect” suppliers, which are often intermediate farms that do not sell directly to slaughterhouses, but supply other farms that might truck cattle to slaughter.
This is a “previously invisible” part of the beef chain, which is not monitored for deforestation risks, researchers said.
The supply chain “map” was then cross-referenced with official datasets on pasture expansion, deforestation rates and figures on regional cattle production to calculate the deforestation “risk” associated with specific companies and the main international export markets.
Because of the high volume of Brazilian beef shipped to China and Hong Kong, these markets are associated with the highest amount of deforestation in total — 16,000 and 22,500 hectares per year — according to the analysis.
The EU also imports more than US$600 million of beef from Brazil each year and that amount would increase if the EU and member states approve a new trade deal with Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay that would gradually allow 99,000 tonnes of low-tariff South American beef into Europe every year.
While some slaughterhouses monitor their direct suppliers, none monitor their indirect suppliers, TRASE lead researcher Erasmus zu Ermgassen said.
“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,” he said.
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