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.
May 9th, 2024
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.
Read the full article here on Yale Environment 360.
Having lived and ranched in Brazil for over 28 years as well as having been deeply involved in the Amazon environmental narrative, all I can say is that this is not anything extraordinary. It has always been that way and always will be that way. Everyone knows this, just ask Jack Link’s and the International Food Corporation whose jerky came from cattle raised in my neck of the woods raised on illegally deforested ground. That was back in 1998.
Campaigns are used to foment anger, justifying intervention in ways we can never imagine. Who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and what was the connection between that propaganda and John Brown, humm? Who broadcast the narrative across the world, did it happen to be open Communist sympathizer Horace Greeley from the New York Tribune who published dozens of article from Karl Marx? What did the saviors do after they destroyed the South, did they honor “40 Acres and a Mule” or did they march west and practice genocide on the Indians?
Could it be that this same system of control coming from the City of London andWall Street (and now Israel) could still be active, perhaps exponentially more powerful and with total control of all levers of power today?
This article referred to comes from a Marxist publication, “Reporter Brasil”, which is doing the bidding of its funders as part of the dialectic. Yale360 is higher on the pecking order, the international broadcaster of propaganda that it extracts from its colonial agent; I.e. Skull & Bones.
As such, reading material coming from such systems of control should be taken with a grain of salt, understanding that the ultimate goal is the elimination of beef production in Brazil as well as in the US. Vote Biden, get vaxxed. Vote Trump, get vaxxed at warp speed.