Brazil Beef Amazon New York Times
How Americans' Ambition for Leather in Luxury SUVs Worsens Amazon Deforestation
An examination of Brazil'south immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.
This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Eye'due south Rainforest Investigations Network.
BURITIS, Brazil — One morning time this summer, Odilon Caetano Felipe, a rancher who raises cattle on illegally deforested land in the Amazon, met with a trader and signed over 72 newly fattened animals. With that stroke of the pen, Mr. Felipe gave his cattle a clean record: By selling them, he obscured their role in the destruction of the world's largest rainforest.
Over luncheon soon after the July xiv auction, Mr. Felipe spoke openly about the business that has made him wealthy. He acknowledged cutting down the thick Amazon woods and that he had not paid for the land. He also said he structured his sales to hide the true origins of his cattle by selling to a middleman, creating a paper trail falsely showing his animals equally coming from a legal ranch. Other ranchers in the area do the same, he said.
"It makes no difference," he said, whether his farm is legal or non.
A New York Times investigation into Brazil'south rapidly expanding abattoir industry — a business organisation that sells not only beef to the world, just tons of leather annually to major companies in the U.s. and elsewhere — has identified loopholes in its monitoring systems that allow hides from cattle kept on illegally deforested Amazon state to catamenia undetected through Brazil's tanneries and on to buyers worldwide.
Mr. Felipe'due south ranch is 1 of more than 600 that operate in an area of the Amazon known equally Jaci-Paraná, a specially protected environmental reserve where deforestation is restricted. And transactions like his are the linchpins of a complex global trade that links Amazon deforestation to a growing appetite in the United states for luxurious leather seats in pickup trucks, SUVs and other vehicles sold by some of the earth'due south largest automakers, among them Full general Motors, Ford and Volkswagen.
A luxury vehicle can crave a dozen or more hides, and suppliers in the United States increasingly buy their leather from Brazil. While the Amazon region is 1 of the globe's major providers of beef, increasingly to Asian nations, the global appetite for affordable leather also means that the hides of these millions of cattle supply a lucrative international leather market valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Epitome
This leather trade shows how the wealthy globe'south shopping habits are tied to environmental degradation in developing nations, in this case by helping to fund destruction of the Amazon despite its valuable biodiversity and the scientific consensus that protecting it would aid to boring climate change.
To track the global trade in leather from illegal ranches in the Brazilian rainforest to the seats in American vehicles, The Times interviewed ranchers, traders, prosecutors and regulators in Brazil, and visited tanneries, ranches and other facilities. The Times spoke to participants at all levels of the illicit merchandise in the Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve, an area in Rondônia State that has been granted special protections because it is abode to communities of people who, for generations, take lived off the state by borer rubber trees.
These communities are now being forced out past ranchers who want the land for cattle. Over the past decade, ranchers have significantly expanded their presence in the reserve, and today some 56 pct of it has been cleared, co-ordinate to information compiled past the state ecology agency.
The reporting is also based on analysis of corporate and international trade data in several countries and thousands of cattle-transport certificates issued by the Brazilian government. The certificates were obtained past the Environmental Investigation Agency, an advocacy group in Washington. The Times independently verified the certificates and separately obtained thousands of additional ones.
This enabled the tracking of leather from illegal farms in the Amazon to slaughterhouses operated by Brazil's three biggest meatpackers, JBS, Marfrig and Minerva, and then to the tanneries they supply. JBS describes itself as the world's largest leather processor.
According to Aidee Maria Moser, a retired prosecutor in Rondônia State who spent virtually two decades fighting illegal ranching in the Jaci-Paraná reserve, the practise of selling animals reared in the reserve to middleman traders suggests an intent to conceal their origin. "Information technology's a way to requite a veneer of legality to the cattle," she said, "then slaughterhouses tin deny there was anything illegal."
The problem isn't limited to Rondônia. Final calendar month, an audit led by prosecutors in the neighboring state of Pará, home to the 2d-largest cattle herd in the Amazon, found that JBS had bought 301,000 animals, amounting to 32 percent of its purchases in the land, between Jan 2018 and June 2019 from farms that violated commitments to prevent illegal deforestation.
JBS disagreed with the criteria used by the prosecutors and agreed to improve its monitoring system, block suppliers flagged by the research and donate $900,000 to the state in response to the inspect.
To get a sense of calibration of the ranches operating in vulnerable areas across the Brazilian Amazon, The Times overlaid government maps of protected Amazon state, deforested areas and farm boundaries with the locations of ranches that JBS publicly listed as supplying its slaughterhouses in 2020. An assay showed that, amidst the JBS suppliers, ranches covering an estimated 2,500 square miles significantly overlapped Indigenous land, a conservation zone or an expanse that was deforested afterwards 2008, when laws regulating deforestation were put in place in Brazil.
The methodology and results were examined and verified by a squad of independent researchers and academics who report land use in the Brazilian Amazon.
International trade data showed companies that ain tanneries supplied with the hides had then shipped leather to factories in Mexico run by Lear, a major seat maker that supplies auto assembly plants beyond the United States. Lear said in 2018 that it was and then sourcing about 70 percent of its raw hides from Brazil. Brazil's hides also go to other countries including Italia, Vietnam and People's republic of china for utilize in the automotive, fashion and piece of furniture industries, the trade data showed.
JBS acknowledged that almost three-quarters of the ranches identified in The Times'southward analysis did overlap with land that the government categorizes every bit illegally deforested, or as Indigenous land or a conservation zone. Only it said all the ranches had been in compliance with rules to preclude deforestation when JBS bought from them.
JBS said that, in those instances where there were overlaps, the farms were allowed to operate in protected or deforested areas, or their boundaries had changed, or they had followed rules to fix their environmental violations. Ranching is allowed in some protected areas in Brazil if it follows sustainable practices.
In a statement, JBS said it has maintained a monitoring system for more than a decade that verifies supplier compliance with its environmental policy. "More than fourteen,000 suppliers have been blocked for failure to comply with this policy," information technology said. Nevertheless, the company said, "the peachy challenge for JBS, and for the beef cattle supply chain in full general, is to monitor the suppliers of its suppliers, since the visitor has no information about them."
Amazon deforestation has surged in recent years equally ranchers race to supply growing need for beef, particularly in Red china. Leather industry representatives brand the betoken that as long as in that location is demand for beefiness, they are simply using hides that would otherwise be sent to landfills.
Raoni Rajão, who studies Amazon supply chains at the Federal Academy of Minas Gerais, said that considering the leather manufacture makes ranching more profitable, information technology shares responsibility for any deforestation. "Leather can accept high added value," he said.
Forest loss is destroying the Amazon's ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which copse pull out of the air. Carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is the principal driver of climate change. Brazil was one of more than 100 nations to pledge to end deforestation by 2030 at the recent United Nations climate summit in Glasgow.
While most ranches in the Amazon region aren't linked to illegal deforestation, the findings show how illegal leather is entering the global supply concatenation, circumventing a organisation that slaughterhouses and leather companies themselves created in recent years to endeavour to show that their cattle come up but from legitimate ranches.
In response to detailed questions, JBS, Marfrig and Minerva said they weren't aware that cattle from the Jaci-Paraná reserve were inbound their supply chains.
All three said they had systems to monitor farms that supply their slaughterhouses direct, and that they exclude farms that don't comply with ecology laws. But all three acknowledged that they tin't trace indirect suppliers, such as Mr. Felipe, who sell cattle through middlemen, masking their origins.
Lear said it used "a robust sourcing process" that ensured it worked "with the most capable and advanced suppliers that are committed to purchasing hides from cattle reared on compliant farms." The company said that if suppliers violated its policies, it would take steps that could include canceling their contracts "and/or legal activeness against the supplier."
Grand.M. said it expected suppliers to "comply with laws, regulations, and act in a manner consequent with the principles and values" of the automaker. Ford said information technology aspired "to source just raw materials that are responsibly produced." Volkswagen said its suppliers already adhered to a high level of sustainability.
In Jaci-Paraná, the global demand for leather is helping to sustain a growing herd of 120,000 cattle where forest once stood. "If all the cattle were sold," said Ms. Moser, the former prosecutor, the regime would have enough coin "to reforest the whole reserve."
'I came here to kill you'
Information technology was pouring rain last December when two men docked at Lourenço Durães' domicile by the Jaci-Paraná River. Mr. Durães, a 71-year-old rubber tapper, invited the men in and offered them coffee. And then, after discussing the conditions for a few minutes, one of the visitors got right to the indicate.
"I won't fool you," he said, according to Mr. Durães and one of his friends, who together described the coming together recently. "I came here to kill you."
They wanted to get rid of Mr. Durães because his state is valuable to ranchers.
Jaci-Paraná was created in 1996 to grant a customs of prophylactic-tree tappers the right to pursue their livelihood. Mr. Durães is among the last of the tappers. The community is being pushed out by deforestation.
"We are frightened, but I promise for justice," Mr. Durães said, adding that he believed he was spared that solar day because he is an old man.
According to Mr. Durães and a constabulary written report filed past his friend, the would-be hit human being identified the person who had sent him, but only past a nickname. The police didn't investigate, co-ordinate to the law study, because Mr. Durães and his friend couldn't provide a full proper noun of a person to press charges against.
In an interview, Lucilene Pedrosa, who directs the regional police division, said her team was waiting for the men to provide more than information then it could investigate.
Government information analyzed by The Times shows the appetite for land in the area. According to the numbers, betwixt January 2018 and June 2021 ranches operating in Jaci-Paraná on illegally deforested land sold at to the lowest degree 17,700 cattle to intermediate ranches. The buyers were suppliers to the three big meatpackers, JBS, Marfrig and Minerva, according to both regime and corporate data.
Virtually half of those 17,700 cattle were bought by Armando Castanheira Filho, a local trader who has been ane of the largest buyers in Jaci-Paraná and a direct supplier to all three major meatpackers. The sales to him created a paper trail that concealed that the cattle originated on illegal ranches.
A Times reporter witnessed such a transaction when Mr. Felipe, the rancher who acknowledged engaging in deforestation, sold his 72 cattle this year. The buyer that twenty-four hour period was Mr. Castanheira.
The Times then tracked the animals. 11 hours afterward, they concluded upwards at a Marfrig shambles.
Marfrig runs a website list where its cattle come up from in an effort to testify that it sources cattle responsibly. For the July fourteen shipment tracked past The Times, Mr. Felipe's ranch isn't listed on the site. But the listing of farms that supplied cattle for the adjacent day's slaughter does include Mr. Castanheira's farm, which is located outside the reserve.
At the end of that solar day at the Marfrig slaughterhouse, a truck marked with the name of a tannery, Bluamerica, left the butchery carrying hides. Bluamerica is a tannery that supplies Lear, the automobile seat maker.
Mr. Castanheira confirmed that some of the cattle he buys from the reserve get direct to slaughter, spending no time at his ranch, although the paperwork shows they went through his own farm outset. He denied doing information technology to hibernate the cattle'due south origin.
"I don't practice this to 'wash' anything," he wrote in a text message. He said his intent was simply to turn a profit from the departure between what he pays for each animate being and what he can get at the slaughterhouse.
Marfrig, Minerva and JBS said they did non acceleration trucks to pick up cattle at the Jaci-Paraná reserve, or whatsoever location other than their direct suppliers. Lawyers for Marfrig take also filed a report with the law that lists the events described by The Times, calling them "potential offenses of criminal nature."
Mr. Castanheira now maintains that the Times reporter witnessed the just example of this kind of transaction by him. All three meatpacking companies said they take now excluded Mr. Castanheira from their supplier pool.
2 of Bluamerica'south owners, companies named Viposa and Vancouros, said their suppliers were subject area to regular audits and acknowledged the challenges of tracing indirect suppliers. Both companies said they were working with the World Wide Fund for Nature, an environmental group based in Switzerland, to improve their systems.
Overall, an analysis of government data on cattle movement in Jaci-Paraná and nearby areas between 2018 and 2021 identified 124 transactions that show signs of cattle laundering, experts say. The transactions show at least 5,600 cattle were transferred from farms in the reserve to middlemen who, on the same day, sold cattle to the three major slaughterhouses.
Holly Gibbs, a Academy of Wisconsin-Madison geographer who has been researching agribusiness in the Amazon for a decade, said that though legitimate middlemen often buy and sell cattle on the aforementioned twenty-four hours, the fact that the transactions aren't closely tracked "is a huge loophole."
"They're bringing animals that were raised on a protected area into national and international supply chains," she said.
The supply concatenation, from the ranch to the auto showroom, is circuitous. Hides from Minerva and JBS slaughterhouses go to JBS-endemic tanneries, while Marfrig'due south hides are mainly processed past Vancouros and Viposa, co-ordinate to corporate data and interviews. Trade information compiled past Panjiva, the supply-chain research unit of measurement at Southward&P Global Market place Intelligence, shows that the seat manufacturer Lear, which is based in Southfield, Mich., is the largest American buyer of hides from JBS, Vancouros and Viposa.
This by May, illegal ranchers in Jaci-Paraná won a major victory. Rondônia'southward governor signed into police force a measure that shrank the size of the reserve by 90 percentage.
The law, which prosecutors are fighting in court, opens a path for ranchers on illegally deforested state to legalize their businesses. Critics of the constabulary said it could set a precedent for farther deforestation in other protected reserves.
No matter the issue of that legal fight, Mr. Durães, the condom tapper, said he did not intend to leave his sliver of woods. The cattle pasture is now barely a mile away from his two-room wooden dwelling house.
Living amidst the mighty trees is the but beingness he knows. And staying, he said, is "the just way to keep the forest standing."
'Transparency' with a loophole
Every few seconds at the Vancouros tannery in southern Brazil, the sound of leather hides tumbling in dozens of xi-foot wooden drums is interrupted by the clicks of a pneumatic marker as each individual hibernate is pierced with a seven-digit code that traces its origin.
Clébio Marques, the tannery's commercial director, plucked a damp bluish hide from a pile, pulled out his telephone and typed its code into a website that his company created for its clients, such as Lear. Up popped the details of the supplier of that specific hide.
"All of our leather is traceable," he said. "This is not required, no one asked for it, but nosotros felt the market needed more than transparency."
But and so Mr. Marques was presented with the finding that ane of his most important suppliers, Marfrig, was buying cattle from suppliers whose transactions showed signs of cattle laundering. "I'one thousand surprised," he said. "Nosotros expect the primary product to be legal."
He stressed, though, that his own company's monitoring wasn't at fault. "Nosotros take to trust the documents that are provided to us, considering our audit is based on their arrangement," Mr. Marques said.
All three major meatpackers accept systems designed to runway the last farm where the cattle they slaughter came from. Nonetheless, all 3 accept the aforementioned flaw: They don't account for the fact that cattle don't typically spend their whole lives on a single farm. Therefore, they don't consider that a direct supplier might be selling cattle that were really raised past someone else, on illegally deforested land.
The tracking systems were created later on a 2009 Greenpeace written report that linked Brazilian beef and leather suppliers to illegal deforestation. Today, the three major firms state that they have zilch-tolerance deforestation policies for all direct suppliers.
All iii major slaughterhouses publicly postal service their tracking information online. JBS'southward is the well-nigh detailed; the other companies omit ranches' precise locations. It was the Times analysis of this JBS data for 2020, the most recent year available, that indicated the company's suppliers included ranches that may have violated government rules designed to prevent deforestation and displacement of Indigenous people.
JBS said all of its suppliers were in compliance at the fourth dimension of purchasing. Marfrig and Minerva said that they shared as much information nearly their direct suppliers every bit permissible under Brazil's data privacy law.
As part of this procedure, tanneries rely on an industry-funded organization, the Leather Working Group, to certify their compliance. The group has assigned its top rating, "gold," to all the Amazon-based tanneries that supply Lear with leather, signifying that they adhere to environmentally sustainable practices.
In a statement, the group said it was working to improve its traceability protocols but that "due the complexity of the farming systems in Brazil and lack of publicly available databases, there is all the same, unfortunately, no like shooting fish in a barrel solution for this state of affairs."
JBS, Marfrig and Minerva all accept publicly pledged to improve the tracking of ranches that sell cattle to its direct suppliers. JBS has said it will trace one layer of indirect suppliers by 2025. Marfrig vowed to trace all its indirect suppliers in the Amazon by 2025 and Minerva said it would take fully traceable supply bondage in South America by 2030.
"Only a nativity-to-slaughter traceability for individual animals is going to be enough to ensure that there is no deforestation in these high-chance supply chains in the Amazon," said Rick Jacobsen of the Environmental Investigation Agency, the nonprofit group.
From Brazil to America's car lots
The leather seats in Cadillac's Escalade SUV, described past a dealer in Washington State as "a luxury hotel on wheels," can button the toll for General Motors' top-of-the-line model to more than $100,000.
The Escalade is 1 of the many vehicles sold in the United States that uses leather seats and other trimmings from Lear, a company that commands about a fifth of the earth'south market in car seats.
Neither Lear nor G.Thousand. labels where the leather for its car seats comes from. Lear's imports of Brazilian leather accept surged over the by decade, driven past a jump in leather sourced from JBS, according to data from Panjiva, the supply-concatenation data company. Final year, Lear was the largest American importer of leather and hides from Brazil, importing about 6,000 tons, the bulk of that from JBS, according to Panjiva data.
Full-size trucks and large SUVs are a growing forcefulness behind the demand for leather trimmings in the auto manufacture. To many buyers, leather "screams luxury and ordinarily adds significant resale value," said Drew Winter, a senior annotator at Wards Intelligence, an automotive research firm.
Raymond Due east. Scott, Lear'south master executive, laid out the importance of luxury vehicles at an investor presentation in June. The visitor has 45 percentage of the luxury market place, he said. And what was propelling the growth in Lear's seating business concern was "really the strength of G.Grand.'due south full-size trucks and SUVs," a lineup that also includes the Yukon, Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban.
In Brazil, "100 percent of our suppliers apply geo-fencing" (a technology that uses GPS to constitute a virtual fence) "to ensure they don't buy animals from farms involved with deforestation," Lear said in a 2018 statement.
Yet, The Times's findings in Brazil indicate that Lear'south suppliers didn't take the ability to track all cattle in this way.
Lear said it required all suppliers to comply with a no-deforestation policy, which bans the utilise of any materials sourced from illegally deforested areas or from Indigenous or other protected lands. According to corporate filings, Lear'due south other biggest customers are Ford, Daimler, Volkswagen and Stellantis, formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and the French maker of Peugeot and Citroën cars.
Paradigm
General Motors said its supply chain was "built on strong, transparent and trusted relationships." Ford said it held itself and its suppliers to ambitious standards and "did well in many areas and tin can improve in others." Volkswagen said it was working on better tracking the supply chain back to the farm.
Daimler said that a modest pct of its leather came from Brazil. Stellantis said it shared concerns over traceability, and was actively working to confirm locations of tanneries and farms in its supply concatenation.
Terminal year, about one-third of the 15,000 tons of leather imported to the United States came from Brazil, which recently overtook Italy to become the biggest exporter of leather and hides to America. Much of that increase can be attributed to the car industry.
The bulk of JBS's leather shipments to Lear in the United States travels from São Paulo to Houston, according to trade data from Panjiva. From at that place, much of information technology is trucked across the Mexican border to one of two dozen car-seat factories operated by Lear in Mexico, where workers cutting the hides and stitch them into seat covers.
The leather is then trucked dorsum over the border. From January 2019 through June 2021, Lear's plants in Mexico shipped at least 1,800 tons of leather to the United States, co-ordinate to trucking data tallied past Material Research.
Its final destination: Lear facilities nationwide. They tend to be located closer to the final motorcar-associates plants, making information technology easier for the company to match color and other variations to the models coming downwards the vehicle assembly lines.
One such destination is General Motors' institute in Arlington, Texas, a sprawling campus on 250 acres where the automaker produces some of the company's largest and almost luxurious trucks, including the Escalade. Autoworkers gather about 1,300 SUVs a solar day for auction in the United States as well every bit for export.
A 10-infinitesimal bulldoze away, Lear has a factory that makes leather seats.
Manuela Andreoni reported from the Jaci-Paraná reserve in Brazil. Hiroko Tabuchi and Albert Sun reported from New York.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/climate/leather-seats-cars-rainforest.html
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