A farm worker said cattle were allowed to roam in areas employees knew were embargoed. Work by NGO 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 Amazon being felled every year to provide meat for world markets.
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. 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 President Michel Temer after secretly recording him appearing to endorse bribery — Temer was indicted but never tried and has always denied the charges, claiming the recording was edited.
In an email, a spokesman for AgroSB said any deforestation had occurred before the company acquired Lagoa do Triunfo in Cattle farming fed its growth from remote Amazon outpost to busy town, and there are clear signs of wealth here. Just outside 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.
Bueno built his business more than 20 years after arriving here with just the clothes on his back. Both men were critical of what they saw as overzealous environmental controls. It was followed in by an agreement JBS and other meat companies signed with federal prosecutors not to buy cattle directly from embargoed or illegally deforested areas. Remove the trees and burn them and they not only stop producing oxygen, but they release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
Put cattle on the land and you replace trees with animals that produce damaging levels of greenhouse gases. Dino and his family were the most environmentally destructive people I have ever met. They are also some of the nicest. They are a family trying to survive in a very hostile environment through often brutal, hard work.
Their view and understanding of the problems the Amazon faces are, therefore, very different than mine. I see the Amazon as an extraordinarily valuable, cathedral of life that should be cherished and protected at all costs—the world needs it, we all need it. Dino sees the Amazon as a vast, regenerating resource that allows him to feed his family.
After talking extensively with him I realized his respect for it was as deep as my own, he just saw it very differently. What happens to wild animals caught in the Amazon fires? The morning after the fire I returned to the land. It smoldered, black and grey. Plumes of blue smoke rose from the few tree trunks that remained upright — scorched totem poles, monuments to human stupidity.
Ash billowed in clouds from my boots as I stalked between fallen tree trunks, blackened to charcoal, some with their hearts still glowing orange inside. I was upset, I was angry. Did I blame Dino and his family for what they had done? If it was me trying to provide for my family in a country with few economic prospects I probably would have done the same. Can we continue to let these practices persist?
We should stop eating beef—particularly Brazilian beef. We need to urgently and drastically reduce the pressure on the Amazon before it reaches a tipping point. The more we cast the problem as good guys against bad guys the more we indulge in thinking and that achieves nothing, other than to push people and problems further from solution.
The problems the Amazon faces are perhaps starker now than ever before. They are myriad and complex. But they are curable. What we need to do now is decide where and how we appoint and apply values based on sensible economic models that favor both the rancher and the forest. One of the issues facing the Brazilian Amazon now is a loosening of regulations by the current administration which has opened up more land for deforestation and burning. This could be catastrophic, both for the Amazon and the rest of the world.
All rights reserved. Culture News. As the Amazon burns, cattle ranchers are blamed. National Geographic photographer Charlie Hamilton James has worked across the Amazon for the past 20 years, covering issues related to fire and deforestation. He also has documented the lives of isolated tribes. Wildcatters and squatters seized land without titles, forging deeds and other permits that still make the region a bramble of land conflicts and legal uncertainty.
By the late s, Amazon deforestation had become a signature issue of the modern-day environmentalist movement. After loggers fell valuable timber, ranchers follow, plant grass and put cattle to pasture. Without the native flora, the once-rich soil dries quickly and loses nutrients. So ranchers move on. Deeper into the forest, he pulled near a large truck, with no license plate, stacked high with freshly cut hardwood. He keeps a large Casio calculator in his ranch office and punctuates his conversation with clicks on its keys.
In , he struck out on his own, determined to find methods to avoid the wastefulness of slash-and-burn ranching. Costa planted new grasses. He fertilized the pastures and rotated cattle on a grazing schedule to optimize feeding times and grass growth. He currently farms about hectares, roughly the size of professional soccer fields. Despite the ecological wealth that woodland represents, cleared land sells for multiples what virgin rainforest does because farmers find it more useful.
His government created nature reserves, better tracked logging and forest fires, and eventually blocked financing for farmers and ranchers caught working illegally cleared land. Costa, meanwhile, further improved his grazing practices. He took soil samples, analyzed land chemistry and increased the number of cattle that could graze each hectare he ranches. He also received threats, he said, from people scorning his decision to leave so much forest intact.
Costa now ranches nearly four times as many head per hectare than the average in Brazil, according to government statistics. By that metric, if other ranchers in the Amazon became as efficient, an area the size of France could be reforested on land today grazed by cattle.
Seeking the secrets of his success, such as the seven different grasses he now grows, fellow ranchers visit Costa often, eager for a peek in the neat black ledger he carries. A global commodities boom a decade ago fueled greater demand for beef and soy. She relaxed regulations on nature reserves and pursued major hydroelectric projects on Amazon tributaries.
By , the boom fizzled, draining government revenues. State and municipal authorities, squeezed by budget shortfalls of their own, struggled to fund law enforcement vital for monitoring destruction locally. After early success tracking supply, the agreement with meatpackers to better monitor ranches yielded less progress than hoped for. JBS, Minerva and Marfrig say they continue to monitor the land of their immediate suppliers.
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