What is cattle laundering—and how are big meat companies involved with it? Episode 3 explores the phenomenon of the smuggling and sale of illegal cattle throughout the Amazon and tells the story of how the meat industry uses its power to undermine climate goals.
Transcript
This transcript was not edited prior to publication.
HEEWON PARK: You’ve probably heard of money laundering. Maybe you imagine mobsters in a corner store, taking dirty assets and washing away their origin to make them look clean. But while some choose to launder dirty cash, others launder cows.
HEEWON PARK: This is the story of one Brazilian company’s entanglement with the smuggling and selling of illegal cattle throughout the Amazon. It’s just one example of how big meat companies around the world exploit their power to undermine climate goals.
HEEWON PARK: From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park,
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’re listening to Barbecue Earth.
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NOAH GORDON: Episode 3 — How to Launder a Cow
HEEWON PARK: The Amazon rainforest. It’s the home of over 47 million people and over 400 indigenous groups. But it’s also a critical agent in protecting the planet from the most detrimental effects of climate change.
NOAH GORDON: The Amazon rainforest is like a massive sponge that absorbs a lot of the carbon emissions from human activity.
HEEWON PARK: That was Noah Gordon, co-director of the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
NOAH GORDON: The Amazon is estimated to store 150 billion metric tons of carbon today. That’s a huge amount–if humans want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, we can only emit another 230 tons.
HEEWON PARK: But the Amazon’s survival is at risk.
AUDIO (BBC): An area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is now being cleared every minute.
AUDIO (SKY): In the South and the East, which accounts for more than a quarter of the Amazon area, it’s become a net source of carbon, and scientists fear that it’s at a tipping point, where great swades could be lost in a self-perpetuating cycle of decline.
HEEWON PARK: Between 1970 and 2018, deforestation reduced the Brazilian Amazon’s tree cover by 17 percent. So what’s causing the Amazon to decline so rapidly? The biggest culprit is meat.
NOAH GORDON: The livestock industry is the biggest driver of this deforestation. Ranchers slash and burn trees to make space for grazing land or for growing fodder crops like soybeans. So when we eat pork or beef, we’re also eating away at the rainforest.
HEEWON PARK: Even big meat companies have acknowledged that Amazon deforestation is a problem. In 2009, facing pressure from Greenpeace, a number of them pledged to stop buying animals from illegally deforested land. Governments, too, have promised to take action. Gordon explains:
NOAH GORDON: In 2014, dozens of governments and companies promised to cut their deforestation in half by 2020. But they didn’t keep their word: their deforestation rates actually rose by nearly 20 percent from 2016 to 2020.
HEEWON PARK: New laws like the EU Deforestation-Free Products Regulation have also taken a stab at curbing deforestation. But on this issue, the world has seen a lot of broken promises.
NOAH GORDON: So it’s no surprise that many climate advocates were skeptical at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, where political leaders from over 100 countries promised to “halt and reverse forest loss” by 2030.
HEEWON PARK: So if countries and companies are promising to stop buying beef linked to deforestation, why does it keep happening? In Brazil, one major reason is something called cattle laundering.
NOAH GORDON: Cattle laundering refers to meat producers’ efforts to hide the illegal origins of their beef.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: So, for example, if you're a Brazilian producer or a global producer operating in Brazil and you want to export beef to Europe, you need to ensure in order to get into that market that your beef meets certain criteria in terms of carbon emissions.
HEEWON PARK: That was Matias Spektor, nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and international relations professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: Because it's so hard to ensure that you produce beef at the highest quality and the lowest possible carbon emission, what these companies normally do is… they fatten the cattle themselves, but they purchase the cattle from other producers.
HEEWON PARK: So there are these middlemen producers. They operate between the farm where the cow is born and the company that packages our filet mignon. They’re technically clean, meaning that their farms have no record of illegal deforestation. But if you take a closer look at where their cattle come from, things get murkier.
NOAH GORDON: These supposedly “clean” farms often have tons of cattle that are purchased or transferred from individual ranchers whose farms are in fact illegally deforested.
HEEWON PARK: Spektor says this process of transferring cattle to middlemen allows meat companies to get away with buying and selling illegal cattle.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: You have a chain of producers that makes it really hard to know where the cattle comes from. The minute that becomes murky, you can get away with reporting only what you know. You only need to ensure that you don't really know where the cattle originally comes from. One recent report suggests that when cattle laundering takes place, cattle may walk for about 1,200 kilometers, moving from farm to farm to confound authorities. Traceability - it's not there.
HEEWON PARK: This process of cattle laundering enables meat companies to deflect responsibility for deforestation. Instead, they can just blame the pesky middlemen who sell them the laundered cattle. But many experts and government officials say these companies are just feigning ignorance.
HEEWON PARK: I spoke with Suely de Araújo, who headed the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or IBAMA, from 2016 to 2018. IBAMA is a federal agency, similar to the EPA in the US. Araújo thinks meat companies already have the capacity to cut out cattle laundering — the problem, she says, is that there is no desire.
SUELY DE ARAÚJO: Nós temos frigoríficos que estão entre os maiores do mundo, são bilionários. Eles têm tecnologia, eles têm como controlar todo o gado...Ninguém consegue me convencer de que eles não conseguem fazer isso ...E não tem como justificar que em 2023, grandes empresas que mexem com carne não tenham tecnologia e capacidade de fazer controle de cada animal. E eu realmente acho que tanto a legislação quanto a atual atuação governamental deveriam ser bem mais fortes nessa perspectiva.
EMILY HARDY (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): We have meatpacking plants that are among the largest in the world, they are billionaires, they have technology, they can control all the cattle...No one can convince me that they can't do it. And no, there is no way to justify that in 2023, large companies that deal with meat do not have the technology and capacity to control each animal. And I really think that both legislation and current government action should be much stronger.
HEEWON PARK: There’s one meatpacking company in particular that is reportedly heavily tied to the Amazon’s deforestation. It’s called JBS, and it’s named after its founder, José Batista Sobrinho.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: In the 1950s, this man called Batista set up shop in the state of Goiás, which is at the heart of what we call the agricultural frontier. He very successfully managed to expand by buying cattle ranches around that area. The company expanded progressively as Brazil modernized and as Brazilians began to consume meat...they had the assistance of the state in the form of subsidized credit by the national Development Bank. And by the time we get to the ‘90s, JBS is now becoming far more dominant in the domestic meat market and beginning to expand. They begin in Argentina and production grows very dramatically. These are highly productive sets of producers that JBS controls across Brazil.
HEEWON PARK: By the mid- to late-2000s, JBS was a powerful multinational company. It had expanded its footprint to include sales in China and the Middle East, and even purchased companies in the US.
HEEWON PARK: The Batista family was becoming increasingly powerful, too. In the 2000s, two of the founder’s sons, Joesley and Wesley Batista, took over the company. In just 10 years, they managed to grow JBS’s revenue by 4,250 percent. During this time, Spektor says Joesley and Wesley Batista became epitomes of Brazilian capitalism—you might even say national cultural icons.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: They were everywhere, in every magazine cover, celebrated as modern, forward-looking Brazil, ambitious, unrepentant—you know, the story of your frontier capitalist. Think Elon Musk, but for protein. These guys are all the rage, until in 2014, this massive corruption scandal was unveiled by the Office of the National Prosecutor. The scandal's called Lava Jato, and the Lava Jato scandal reveals that politicians left and right in Brazil had for many years been selling legislation in exchange for illicit funds to pay for their political campaigns.
HEEWON PARK: The Lava Jato scandal wreaked havoc throughout the entire nation. It contributed to the impeachment of Brazil’s then-president Dilma Rousseff. Prosecutors revealed that a huge swath of Brazilian companies were involved in a national corruption scheme. And Spektor says JBS was one of the companies at the heart of it all.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: The revelation was brought to public that one of the Batista brothers had called the new president and had met the new president in the parking lot of the presidential palace in the middle of the night to strike a deal, whereby JBS would buy the silence of the former Speaker of the House, who was now in prison.
HEEWON PARK: The Brazilian public learned that JBS had been deeply involved in all sorts of political corruption. Here’s Matias Spektor’s perspective.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: They'd been financing the political campaigns of mayors, members of Congress, senators and governors, both those in office and those in opposition.
HEEWON PARK: In a Hollywood film, the firm involved in this corruption would probably be drilling for oil or mining diamonds. But in this case, the firm was killing animals for meat – JBS currently slaughters an estimated 75,000 cows per day. All of these corruption allegations hurt JBS dramatically. There was even an informal nationwide boycott of JBS meat.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: Stock prices plummeted. There was a big push to take the Batista brothers to prison. They served time in prison. But what the company did in the midst of all this was, first of all, cut its losses and rebrand big time. So they brought in new management, not linked to the family.
HEEWON PARK: JBS also decided to double down on purchasing companies in the US. And Spektor says their global power is still growing.
MATIAS SPEKTOR: They have a listing in Brazil, and they will have a listing in the stock exchange in New York from a parent company that they founded now in the Netherlands, because they operate in the European market for beef.
HEEWON PARK: Despite the setbacks JBS faced during the Lava Jato scandal, it has somewhat recovered from its political scandals since then. JBS continues to claim they are taking adequate steps to tackle illegal deforestation.
NOAH GORDON: The company’s CEO claims that JBS has a “zero tolerance deforestation policy.” According to Reuters, JBS “tracks its direct cattle suppliers with satellite geo monitoring and its indirect suppliers with blockchain technology to prevent deforestation in its supply chain.”
HEEWON PARK: And yet, time and time again, JBS continues to face allegations and lawsuits claiming that it isn’t taking deforestation seriously.
NOAH GORDON: In 2022, according to a report from Unearthed, JBS admitted to buying nearly 9,000 cows from a high-profile criminal named Chaules Pozzebon. Prosecutors have called him “one of the biggest deforesters in Brazil.” Environmental organizations have questioned how JBS’s monitoring system failed to flag these sales as suspect, even when linked to such an infamous environmental criminal.
HEEWON PARK: And this isn’t an isolated case. In 2022, Brazilian prosecutors found that JBS had purchased over 85,000 cows from illegally deforested ranches. They were from a state in the Amazon called Pará. They also found that JBS had “the lowest environmental compliance rate among large meatpackers there, with 1 out of 6 cows coming from dubious or illegal sources.”
NOAH GORDON: It’s hard to believe that JBS really has a zero-tolerance policy for deforestation. The company doesn’t release comprehensive data on sourcing, the number of animal slaughters, or its total emissions. This makes it very difficult for external organizations to verify the company’s claims about protecting the Amazon.
HEEWON PARK: And despite all of this, JBS–like so many other meat producers–has denied responsibility for deforestation, saying that it’s too difficult to track its independent suppliers. Here’s US Senator Ron Wyden at a 2023 Senate hearing:
AUDIO (SEN. RON WYDEN): The finance committee wrote to JBS asking for key records and information, but this multinational was stonewalling. Upon further questioning, JBS said it was impossible to monitor its indirect suppliers. However, outside investigators, lacking JBS’s considerable resources, were able to analyze the records that proved the existence of deforestation in the company’s supply chain.
HEEWON PARK: So how do firms like JBS continue to avoid consequences for their environmental violations? Is it just masterful marketing, or is there something more? That’s coming up next, after the break.
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HEEWON PARK: When it comes to combating pro-climate regulations, big meat companies like JBS have learned from the best: the fossil fuel giants.
JENNIFER JACQUET: There are similarities in the way that industries fight all regulation across the board. And then there are very specific similarities between how fossil fuel producers and large meat and dairy producers have fought climate regulations both in the United States and internationally.
HEEWON PARK: That was Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. She’s also the author of a book called The Playbook, which explores the tactics that big corporations use to combat health and climate regulations.
HEEWON PARK: According to Jacquet, the animal agriculture sector has been “borrowing tactics from the fossil fuel playbook” since at least 2006. Gordon says 2006 was an important year.
NOAH GORDON: 2006 was the year that the UN published a landmark report titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It named animal agriculture as “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems.”
HEEWON PARK: Since then, the meat industry has adopted many of the fossil fuel sector’s old tricks. One of their most basic tactics has been the promotion of skepticism about climate change.
NOAH GORDON: Recent investigations have actually shown that ExxonMobil knew about climate change as early as 1977, well before it emerged as an issue in the public sphere. But instead of acknowledging that their activities had dangerous consequences, ExxonMobil spent decades pouring money into denying the existence of climate change.
HEEWON PARK: For decades, the fossil fuel sector has invested heavily in creating a network of climate denialism research and advocacy.
NOAH GORDON: This network has a truly vast reach. It includes advocacy groups and think tanks like the Heartland Institute, which has even claimed that the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are good for the environment.
HEEWON PARK: The meat and dairy sector has followed in the fossil fuel sector’s footsteps of promoting and funding climate skepticism. In 2019, the farming advocacy group American Farm Bureau Federation publicly opposed “any actions… to regulate emissions of GHGs,” and questioned the validity of anthropogenic causes of climate change.
HEEWON PARK: There are some meat and dairy companies that do acknowledge the existence of human-caused climate change, Jacquet says they choose the next best option, deflecting blame by denying causation.
JENNIFER JACQUET: Meat and dairy, what their bread and butter is, to deny that meat and dairy production has lasting effects on the climate. They especially are fans of saying that they do not add additional warming and that is their key area of obstruction, which is to challenge causation — that the meat and dairy industry does not cause anthropogenic climate change.
HEEWON PARK: One way the meat and dairy sector does this is by trying to change the math that’s used to measure climate change. Jacquet says the meat and dairy industry advocates for a metric called GWP*. GWP* measures changes in methane emissions, as opposed to the actual amount emitted per year. So a big meat producer like New Zealand could make their beef farms ever so slightly more efficient and then claim that they are “climate-neutral.” Jacquet says this promotion of GWP* is one way the meat and dairy sector tries to co-opt science for its own benefit.
JENNIFER JACQUET: it's a way of controlling not only the kind of public conversation and of downplaying the role of meat and dairy in climate change, but of really confusing the scientific basis and the scientific understanding of this problem as well.
HEEWON PARK: And this co-optation of science doesn’t stop with GWP*. It also extends into the realm of academia. According to Jacquet, the meat and dairy industry works to compile an arsenal of seemingly independent, objective actors who help challenge the causal link between animal agriculture and climate change. She calls this arsenal a “suite of expertise.”
JENNIFER JACQUET: University experts are the creme de la creme of expertise. And what we have seen with meat and dairy companies and many other companies… is a kind of infiltration into a number of universities, but in particular the University of California, Davis.
HEEWON PARK: UC Davis is home to the CLEAR Center. The CLEAR Center is an agricultural research institution that was established with a $2.9 million gift from the American Feed Industry Association’s nonprofit. According to the New York Times, the American Feed Industry Association is “a livestock industry group that represents major agricultural companies like Cargill and Tyson.” As of April 2022, the CLEAR Center continues to receive the vast majority of its funding from industry groups like the California Cattle Council.
HEEWON PARK: The professor who heads this research center is an academic named Frank Mitloehner.
JENNIFER JACQUET: In 2009, in response to Livestock’s Long Shadow, he publishes a paper that becomes a press release out of UC Davis that is titled “Don't Blame Cows for Climate Change.”
HEEWON PARK: This research initiative was funded in part by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, but Jacquet says that it was presented as independent expertise challenging the view that cows contribute to climate change.
JENNIFER JACQUET: If you dig more deeply, it really doesn't challenge that at all. What it does, and this is something that the meat and dairy industry loves to do is it starts to conflate national and global statistics. So it's like the United Nations says meat and dairy accounts for 15% of global warming. But you know what? It only accounts for 4% in the United States.
HEEWON PARK: According to Jacquet, Frank Mitloehner uses this sort of statistical sleight of hand throughout his paper, and by doing so, he casts doubt on the UN Livestock’s Long Shadow report. Mitloehner responded to her accusations in the Washington Post, saying that with his research, he was “able to help set the record straight about the true impact of animal agriculture on global warming.”
HEEWON PARK: But this is just one example of how the meat industry has fought to deny the reality that livestock farming is responsible for around 15% of planet-heating emissions.
JENNIFER JACQUET: They've created what I would argue is really a PR machine.
HEEWON PARK: And in many ways, this PR machine has had quite a bit of success.
NOAH GORDON: Most Americans don’t even think about meat and dairy as a climate problem. We still see celebrities like Aubrey Plaza doing ads mocking oat milk as a silly novelty.
AUDIO (WOOD MILK AD): Hi, I’m Aubrey Plaza. You know me as an actress, but I’m also the co-founder of Wood Milk: the world’s first and only milk made from wood. Wood Milk started with a simple idea. I saw a tree and I asked myself: can I drink this? As it turns out, the answer is yes. If you make it into milk.
NOAH GORDON: But we never see these people make the same jokes about solar panels or electric cars.
HEEWON PARK: According to Jacquet, both the fossil fuel and meat industries use their power and connections to build these PR machines and fight climate policy.
JENNIFER JACQUET: They are incredibly politically active at local, state, national and the international level… we see that a company like Tyson, the largest meat company in the United States, actually spends more as a percentage of revenue on lobbying than ExxonMobil.
HEEWON PARK: Still, there’s one fundamental difference in how fossil fuels and meat approach climate policy.
JENNIFER JACQUET: So you actually see fossil fuel companies really embracing this idea of individual responsibility, really trying to talk about the role of the consumer, the role of demand that, yes, if you want to help climate action, you should take your golf clubs out of the trunk. You should drive less, you should figure out commuting. You should use our carbon footprint calculator that British Petroleum BP actually pioneered. They love the idea of consumer action because it's a deflection from the producers and because they know that people's energy choices are largely baked in... Oil and gas companies really embrace the idea of individual responsibility and they've been using it as a delay tactic for about 20 years now.
HEEWON PARK: In contrast, Jacquet says that when anyone recommends that consumers take action and eat less meat and dairy —
JENNIFER JACQUET: the meat and dairy industry goes bananas. They do everything in their power to stop any idea of individual responsibility from percolating.
HEEWON PARK: One example of this has been the often extreme backlash to vegetarian campaigns–the meat and dairy industry is sometimes behind these.
NOAH GORDON: In 2013, in Germany, the Green Party proposed a weekly vegetarian day. It was going to be just one day that federal government cafeterias wouldn’t be allowed to serve meat. Germans freaked out, and meat industry supporters launched a “Hands Off My Sausage” campaign in retaliation. The Greens fell in the polls and took years to recover. Today, we see something similar occurring today as politicians from Wisconsin to Italy try to make it illegal for oat milk sellers to call their product “milk”.
AUDIO (CBS): The debate used to be whether the glass was half empty or half full. Now the question is: is it a glass of milk if it’s not from a cow?
HEEWON PARK: So far, animal agriculture has managed to both skirt existing climate regulations and suppress the rise of new ones. But its impact isn’t limited to shaping public discourse and national climate policy. Meat has also shown its geopolitical power.
HEEWON PARK: Coming up next in Episode 4, we look at the so-called Meat Triangle — the United States, Brazil, and China and how meat shapes the behavior of these countries on the international stage. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’ve been listening to Barbecue Earth.
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HEEWON PARK: This episode was written by Noah Gordon and me, Heewon Park, and produced by me with assistance from Emily Hardy, Daniel Helmeci, Tim Martin, and Zachary Mills. Music was composed by me and artists on Pixabay. Legal review was done by Korieh Duodu and Kate Logan, and fact checking by Ryan DeVries. Thank you to Megan Wiegand and Lindsay Maizland for editing support, Emily Hardy and Daniel Helmeci for research support, and Amy Mellon, Jocelyn Soly, and Amanda Branom for their graphic design work.
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You have been listening to an audio production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Views expressed are those of the host and guest panelists, and not necessarily those of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Subscribe to Carnegie podcasts on popular podcast platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at carnegieendowment.org.
