A JBS facility in Tucuma, Brazil. JONNE RORIZ / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Reducing meat in our diet was easier living in India, and we committed specifically to cutting beef consumption. This effort has been assisted by awareness of this issue. Thanks to Yale e360 for bringing the work of this team to our attention:

Marcel Gomes (center) with colleagues at Repórter Brasil’s offices in São Paulo. GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE

Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

Journalist Marcel Gomes has traced beef in supermarkets and fast food restaurants in the U.S. and Europe to Brazilian ranches on illegally cleared land. In an e360 interview, he talks about the challenges of documenting the supply chains and getting companies to clean them up.

Investigative journalism can be a very deep dive. By the end of his probe into the supply chain of JBS, the world’s largest meat processing and packing company, Marcel Gomes reckons he and his team at the São Paulo-based nonprofit Repórter Brasil knew more about the origins of the beef it supplies from the Amazon to the world’s hamburger chains and supermarkets than the company itself.

With grassroots support from labor unions and Indigenous communities, he had mapped the complex networks of cattle farms responsible for illegal deforestation. He then tracked the often-illicit beef through JBS’s slaughterhouses and packing plants to the freezers, shelves, and customer trays of retail outlets and fast-food restaurants around the world. When his sleuths were done, the fingerprints of forest destruction were plain to see. Six of Europe’s biggest retail chains reacted by halting purchases of JBS beef.

That investigation just won Gomes, 45, a Goldman Environment Prize. But sadly, he says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, when he went to San Francisco last month to pick up the prize, stores there still had tainted beef on their shelves.

Yale Environment 360: Why did you choose to investigate JBS?

Marcel Gomes: Well, Brazil is the world’s biggest beef exporter. My country has more than 200 million cattle, and ranching is the single biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon, where more than 40 percent of the cattle are raised. JBS is our biggest beef company. It slaughters more than 12 million animals a year, exporting their meat to the United States, Europe, and across the world. And it’s not just a beef company. It exports leather — for instance to Germany, where it makes car seats — and biodiesel made from beef tallow.

e360: Can you describe how you tracked its supply chain?

Gomes: Since 2011, Brazil has had legislation intended to improve the transparency of sources of supply of beef and other agricultural commodities. So, at Repórter Brasil, which was founded in 2008, we began to collect this public data on everything related to environmental, social, and labor issues. We started to cross-check the data so we could trace supply chains right from the ranch to consumers.

Then we put this information together with data on areas where ranchers had been fined for environmental violations such as deforestation, and where there were reports of modern slavery and forced or child labor. We also used satellite images to identify which farms had seen deforestation each year, and we tapped into data on the transport of cattle from those farms to the slaughterhouses receiving the cattle…

Read the whole story here.