- A study shows that an area equivalent to nine times the size of Greater London was deforested in the Brazilian Amazon in 2015 to address the demand for beef from other parts of the country.
- The article, published in Nature Sustainability, concluded that the domestic market answered for three times more deforestation than international sales.
- Despite the predominance of domestic consumption, beef exports from Brazil have been increasing, and international capital has a crucial role in financing the country’s largest meat and soy companies.
Since the first roads opened the way to the cheap and unexplored lands of northern Brazil in the 1950s, the Amazon Rainforest has been playing an unglamorous role in the global economy. Despite its cultural and environmental richness, the rainforest became a commodity source of low-value-added products, which left behind a trail of deforestation and little economic development.
The transformation of the Amazon into an agribusiness hub was pushed by the beef and, more recently, grain industries: The region’s contribution to the country’s total cattle herd rose from 9.5% in the mid-1970s to 44.5% in 2022, and from 0.02% to 41.5% for soybeans. Part of it is exported to China, Europe, and other regions, as it was long emphasized by the media and activists.
With 13.2% of the rainforest lost, pressure to stop the clearances falls not only on those operating the chainsaws but also on the consumers of these products. Scientists have been warning that the rainforest could lose its capacity to store carbon if deforestation reaches a 25% “tipping point” — where the Amazon would start to dry up and look like a savanna and not as a forest anymore. To stop this trend, environmentalists have been pressuring companies and governments to tackle deforestation.
“The whole discussion has always been on the supply side,” Eduardo Haddad, a professor from the Department of Economics of the University of São Paulo, told Mongabay. “But the question now is: Where does this demand come from?”
To answer this question, he and six other scientists analyzed the commercial flows of the main Amazon deforestation drivers: beef and soy. They looked at data from 2015 (the last year with all the official data needed for the study) and reached a counterintuitive conclusion: Most of this production actually supplied markets in Brazil’s Southwest region, where lies the country’s most populated metropolis, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — and not foreign markets.
“Most efforts to quantify the associations between consumer markets and deforestation mainly consider international exports rather than domestic and local sources of demand,” the researchers wrote in the article, published in early June by Nature Sustainability. “Here we show that economic demand originating in the more developed Brazilian centre-south imposes a much stronger pressure on the Amazon’s deforestation than local (within the Amazon) and foreign export demand.”
According to the researchers, the domestic market is responsible for almost triple the deforestation generated by international demand. From the 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) deforested in 2015, 60% were connected to demand from Brazil and 23% to international purchases. Sales from the Amazonian states corresponded with only 17% of the clearances.
The study shows that beef consumption by Brazilians is by far the largest deforestation driver. According to the analysis, 1.4 million hectares (3.5 million acres, the equivalent to nine cities the size of Greater London) were deforested in 2015 to open space for pasture. More than 60% of these clearances were related to demand from other parts of the country and 21% to foreign demand.
“It’s very interesting to see this new model confirming this pattern of consumption that has been observed for a long time,” said André Vasconcelos, the global engagement lead at Trase, a platform that tracks the exports of commodities linked to deforestation. “It tells us the key players in the game who need to be at the table to build this change.”
Pushing the right players
However, reducing the internal demand for deforestation-linked goods is not easy. While the European Union market requires its suppliers to track the cattle individually, for example, there is no such requirement in Brazil. “The internal market doesn’t do that. Why don’t we worry about this in São Paulo?” Haddad asked.
A recent survey from Idec, a consumer protection institute, shows that the environmental impact of the beef supply chain is not a major issue for Brazilian consumers, who are more concerned about the hygiene conditions of the meat.
“It’s a challenge. The consumer cares more about the health issues than the environmental issues behind the meat,” said Dariele Santos, impact coordinator of a mobile application called “Do Pasto ao Prato” (“From Pasture to Plate”). The initiative, developed by the Université Catholique de Louvain, the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, helps consumers make a conscious choice about the beef they buy.
By scanning the sanitary inspection code of a piece of beef, consumers can check the risk of deforestation associated with the slaughterhouse it came from and other information, such as sanitary or labor irregularities.
The initiative also intends to press Brazilian supermarkets to stop selling deforestation and modern slavery-linked beef. “We believe very much in the shared responsibility of retail chains because they are the ones who deliver the final product to the consumer and they have a lot of power to change the game,” Santos said.
In Europe, new legislation banning deforestation-linked imports is putting more pressure on supermarkets. In March 2021, the Casino group was sued in France for allegedly buying beef from cattle raised in illegally deforested areas. Nine months later, six European retail chains decided to stop selling Brazilian beef.
In Brazil, some companies have committed to improving beef tracking. However, a report from Brazilian conservation nonprofit Imazon released in late 2023 concluded that 95% of the country’s largest retailers have poor control over the livestock chain.
For Vasconcelos, continuous pressure on international actors can also help raise the standards of Brazilian companies. “This foreign market link sends a very clear message to Brazil that it needs to position itself if it wants to be a leader in agriculture and sustainability.”
Foreign capital also plays a decisive role in financing Brazil’s main meatpackers and retailers. JBS’s bid for a New York Stock Exchange listing, for example, could raise billions of dollars for the world’s largest meat packer — which is also the most exposed company to Amazon deforestation risks, according to Imazon. The beef giant’s plans, described by the environmental NGO Mighty Earth as “the most important IPO for the climate in history,” is being challenged in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by a group of nonprofits.
Another reason not to underestimate international influence on Amazon deforestation is Brazil’s increasing role in beef exports. “In the last decade, meat exports to China have quadrupled, and projections indicate that they will continue to increase,” Vasconcelos said.
Banner image: An article published in Nature Sustainability found more than over 60% of the Amazon deforestation related to cattle ranching is linked to beef consumption from other parts of Brazil. Image © Ricardo Funari/Lineair/Greenpeace.
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Citation:
Haddad, E. A., Araújo, I. F., Feltran-Barbieri, R., Perobelli, F. S., Rocha, A., Sass, K. S., & Nobre, C. A. (2024). Economic drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian legal Amazon. Nature Sustainability. doi:10.1038/s41893-024-01387-7
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