Brazil’s environmental authorities announced a major operation that seized around 7,000 illegal head of cattle in the Amazon on Thursday. The government also issued fines to several ranchers and slaughterhouses, including JBS NV, the world's largest meat supplier.
The move comes on the same day a separate analysis revealed that American burgers are increasingly financing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Nearly a quarter of Brazil’s beef exports to the US come from slaughterhouses located next to areas where illegal deforestation is rampant, according to Earthsight, a UK-based nonprofit that investigates links between environmental crime and consumption.
Raising cattle is the main driver of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon, along with opening roads. Between 1985 and 2023, an area slightly larger than France has been converted into pasture. Protecting the rainforest is a central focus of climate talks set to be held later this year in Brazil, though new government action and reports make clear how much of a challenge that will be.
Currently, 13 Amazon-based slaughterhouses have approval to export to the US. Five of them are located in Rondonia state, where lawmakers passed legislation that regularized hundreds of cattle ranchers who had converted a protected conservation area into pasture for more than 200,000 head of cattle.
More facilities getting approval to export beef puts a higher “burden on American importers to ensure their supply chains are not tainted by deforestation or illegality increases,” says the report.
One of the companies authorized to export beef from the Amazon is JBS, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in June despite opposition from environmentalists. This week, Brazil’s environmental agency, known as Ibama, fined the meatpacker $75,000 for allegedly purchasing 810 heads of cattle raised on land previously embargoed due to illegal deforestation.
“Those who clear land without authorization — and those who finance, raise or buy cattle from embargoed areas — feed a cycle of illegality that puts additional pressure on the rainforest,” Ibama said in a press statement.
This is the third phase of Ibama's long-term operation to curb deforestation by fighting illegal practices in the beef supply chain, dubbed Cold Meat. One of the main challenges is to tackle cattle laundering via indirect suppliers. Criminal offenders usually transfer cows from an illegally deforested area to a legal farm before selling to slaughterhouses, blurring traceability. Ibama issued two warning notices to JBS for purchasing 1,209 heads that had gone through an embargoed land before being acquired from a direct and legal supplier.
Cold Meat's first phase took place in 2017, and the second one last year, both of which also saw JBS slapped with fines. JBS in October was issued a $108,000 fine.
JBS said in a statement to Bloomberg News that it didn’t have access to Ibama's inspection report, “which is necessary to clarify the facts described in the notice of violation.”
This time, inspectors monitored about 2,100 hectares (5,200 acres) of embargoed land in the state of Pará — which will host COP30 climate talks in November — where vegetation had been illegally cleared and should have been under recovery. Besides JBS, five slaughterhouses were found to have bought illegal cattle raised there. In total, Cold Meat issued more than $118.5 million in fines to companies and ranchers.
Brazil exported about 180,000 metric tons of beef to the US in the first half of 2025 — more than double the volume seenover the same period last year, according to government data. The US is the second-largest buyer of Brazilian beef behind only China, though President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on Brazil shipments may impact exports.
Besides JBS, Earthsight also identified two other meatpacking giants, Marfrig Global Foods SA and Minerva SA, as US suppliers linked to deforestation, land grabbing and other environmental crimes. The Brazilian Beef Exporters Association declined to comment, citing short notice.
In a statement sent to the nonprofit, JBS said its procedures to monitor the supply chain go beyond legal requirements and that it enforces “a rigorous zero-tolerance sourcing policy for agricultural commodities, with strong anti-deforestation measures.” The company added that by next January, it will only buy cattle using a platform it’s developing “where direct suppliers register and can indicate the origin of purchased animals.”
Minerva also sent a response to Earthsight saying that it “has already achieved 100% monitoring of all its direct suppliers in the region” and was “implementing various initiatives and practices related to traceability and socio-environmental monitoring.”
In its statement to Earthsight, Marfrig said that the report's methodology is flawed for “assuming that the existence of mapped areas at risk of deforestation in potential supply zones automatically implies a direct link with suppliers or a lack of control mechanisms on the part of the company.” It added that, in areas classified as high and very high risk, it has already achieved 100% traceability of indirect suppliers.
© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.