JBS, which owns the Friboi, Seara and Swift brands, is the world’s largest meat producer. Itmust commit to immediately stop purchasing cattle from deforesters, criminals who are already part of its supply chain in 2021. The whole world has been following the decline in environmental protection and the advance of deforestation in the Amazon in the last two years. In 2020, 1,385,300 hectares of forest were cut down in Brazil (24 trees per second), and 99.4% of deforestation in the Amazon was in protected areas and linked to increased livestock farming in the region. JBS ignores its responsibility, and in its “net zero” plan it has the gall to promise that it will only engage with suppliers that deforest in the Amazon until 2025. (3 more years!) In other biomes of the country, it says it has the objective of ending the purchase of cattle linked to deforestation in 2030, and says it intends to reach zero deforestation in its global supply chain by 2035! In other words, the company’s “net zero” plan allows it to deforest for another 14 years. How can this be? These promises are already being questioned internationally, as in the report “The Big Con: How Big Polluters are advancing a “net zero” climate agenda to delay, deceive, and deny.”
Last year, the British magazine The Economist dedicated two pages of its June 11 issue to exposing the Brazilian agribusiness and its shameful link to deforestation in the Amazon and the Cerrado. The magazine brought to light data from TRASE (https://trase.earth/), a European initiative that promotes transparency and exposes illegal activity in supply chains, to show that producing Brazilian beef leads to 6 times more deforestation than soy. Every year criminal ranchers cut down around 600 soccer fields of native forest to turn it into pasture. Also last year, an article in The Guardian newspaper exposed cattle raised in an embargoed area that the company was acquiring. In 2017, Operation Weak Meat had already discovered dozens of meat processing plants and farms selling cattle raised in deforested areas to JBS.
Learn more:
“The Big Con” report: https://bit.ly/35ZxDdz “A study names firms that buy products from areas with deforestation” – The Economist: https://econ.st/2Y77F4T
“JBS continues to buy cattle from deforesters in the Amazon even after a fine of R$25 million” – Repórter Brasil: https://bit.ly/3xaQMoW
“JBS buys cattle from an illegally deforested area and receives a fine of R$24 million” – UOL: https://bit.ly/361r0HQ
