Traceability is Brazil’s watchword against livestock deforestation

Joint commitments and legally binding initiatives to curb deforestation in supply chains can accelerate the transition to zero deforestation, according to a roadmap signed by the largest agricultural commodity traders, including Cargill, Bunge, Archer Daniels Midland, Louis Dreyfus, Brazil’s JBS and Marfrig, and China’s COFCO International.

The initiative, agreed to last year at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt, pledges to eliminate deforestation from their soy, beef, and palm oil supply chains by 2025. Big Agro hopes the effort will help the world limit global warming to an increase of 1.5°C, one of the main goals of the Paris Agreement.

They presented the results of their first year of commitment during this year’s COP28, held in Dubai.

Regarding beef traders, the report focused on ongoing efforts to track cattle and provide the Brazilian government, the world’s largest exporter and second largest producer of beef, with tools to implement a national traceability strategy.

The report was presented by the Brazilian Beef Exporters Association (Abiec), which coordinates initiatives among companies in the sector.

In the so-called “Legal Amazon” (a group of nine states through which the rainforest biome passes), cattle ranching is the largest vector of deforestation. To put this in perspective, achieving zero deforestation in this biome alone would save approximately 11,500 square kilometers of Amazon forest — the equivalent of 578 million trees and an area twice the size of the U.S. state of Delaware.

“The big companies can’t just go and create their own traceability systems because they all buy cattle from the same places [suppliers]. Also, there has been an expression of interest on the part of the government to have a state-mandated policy on traceability,” Jack Hurd, executive director of the Tropical Forest Alliance, a World Economic Forum initiative that works with extractive companies on environmental commitments, tells The Brazilian Report.

The international community is hopeful that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s zero-deforestation pledge, led by Environment Minister Marina Silva, combined with the European Union’s new import rules, can give new impetus to Brazil’s traceability efforts.

Brazil already has environmental and livestock monitoring systems in place, but they were not designed for the same purposes and do not communicate with each other.

The Brazilian Table for Sustainable Livestock, a nonprofit association that brings together companies and organizations in the sector, will present a proposal to the Agriculture Ministry to create a single database that combines data from the GTA (a state-managed documentation system for animal transit) and the CAR (or Rural Environmental Registry).

While the GTA provides information such as the origin and destination of the animals, the CAR provides information on the environmental compliance status of the areas where the animals have been.

Both systems have their problems and limitations. For one thing, the GTA is a confidential system, with information available only to government agencies. Not even meat producers have access to it.

It is a database created for animal health purposes, and there is resistance from the industry to use it in any other way — full disclosure of this information could reveal...