Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions-including JBS investors-made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. It’s the deforestation capital of the world. “If what you’re after is cattle,” he says, “you needn’t go anywhere else.”įerreira Sandes negotiates a deal for a group of cattle in São Félix do Xingu.īut the municipality that’s as big as Ireland lays claim to a more notorious title too. At 2.4 million head, it’s home to Brazil’s largest herd. For buyers like Ferreira Sandes, there’s no better haunt than São Félix do Xingu. He visits three ranches a day-four, if he hustles-picking up 23 cows here, 68 there. But the competition is fierce, the going slow. The faster he hits his mark, the sooner he goes home. He’s on the hunt for 5,000 head of cattle to feed a pipeline pumping beef through slaughterhouses owned by Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS SA and others, then into markets from Miami to Hong Kong. Just about everybody knows everybody else, especially Stanisley Ferreira Sandes.įour months a year, Ferreira Sandes, 47, crisscrosses São Félix’s almost 85,000 square kilometers (33,000 square miles) in a four-by-four Chevrolet with a cowboy hat on the dash and a revolver under the seat. It’s a place outsiders don’t have much reason to visit, where motorcyclists won’t wear helmets because people want to know who is coming and going. Cattle outnumber people almost 20-to-1 and, after dusk, the cratered, dirt roads fill with big rigs hauling the mammoth trunks of stolen trees. São Félix do Xingu is a modern-day Wild West hacked out of Brazil’s Amazon jungle by folks with little to lose.
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