Risk factor: deforestation
Failure by JBS to map out its entire cattle supply chain, including indirect suppliers, exposes it to serious risk of trade from suppliers linked to deforestation, and the evidence laid out below shows that it does in fact trade with such suppliers. Its publicised role in transporting cattle between farms means it may even be facilitating the process of cattle laundering, a widespread problem in the Brazilian Amazon. JBS’s cattle suppliers have been repeatedly linked to forest destruction – legal or otherwise – in violation of the 2009 G4 Cattle Agreement (see pages 20–21). In 2017, following its Carne Fria (‘Cold Meat’) in investigation into over a dozen slaughterhouses in Pará, Tocantins and Bahia, Brazil’s environment agency IBAMA suspended two JBS plants and fined the company a total of R$24.7 million ($7.7 million) for buying cattle raised on embargoed land that had previously been illegally deforested and cleared by burning.69 According to Reuters, the agency also accused JBS of having ‘for years knowingly bought cattle that were raised on illegally deforested land’ in the Amazon state of Pará. IBAMA reported that JBS had bought 49,438 illegal cattle between 2013 and 2016, half of them directly from farms under embargo for illegal deforestation – a clear violation of the terms of its TAC and the G4 Cattle Agreement – and the remainder via ‘three-way “laundering” transactions to disguise the source’.70 (Such ‘triangulation’ – sourcing via an intermediary to conceal the origin of beef linked to environmental issues – appears to be common;71 see also pages 42–43.) IBAMA added that JBS was the purchaser of 84% of the animals its investigation had detected as coming from deforested lands.72 An audit by federal prosecutors found that 19% of the cattle JBS purchased in Pará in 2016 had ‘evidence of irregularities’.73 JBS denied purchasing from embargoed ranches and won an injunction allowing the plants to continue
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