Report links world's top meat firm JBS to deforestation
AFP, JUL 28 2020, 08:06 IST UPDATED: JUL 28 2020, 08:06 IST
Aerial picture showing a deforested piece of land in the Amazon rainforest near an area affected by fires, about 65 km from Porto Velho, in the state of Rondonia, in northern Brazil. Credit: AFP File Photo Brazilian firm JBS, the world's biggest meat...
Brazilian firm JBS, the world's biggest meat processing company, was again accused Monday of "laundering" cattle from ranches blacklisted for destroying the Amazon rainforest.
The charge, leveled in a report by an investigative journalism consortium, marks at least the fifth time in just over a year that the company, which exports around the world, has been accused of cattle laundering.
That is a practice in which animals from a blacklisted ranch are transferred to one with a clean record to dodge a ban on sales.
The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, British newspaper the Guardian and Brazilian journalism group Reporter Brasil said in the joint report that pictures posted on Facebook by a JBS truck driver appeared to show him and his colleagues transporting cattle from a blacklisted ranch, Estrela do Aripuana, to a "clean" one 300 kilometers (185 miles) away, Estrela do Sangue, in July 2019.
The drivers wore JBS uniforms and drove JBS trucks in the pictures.
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/business/report-links-worlds-top-meat-firm-jbs-to-deforestation-866528.html
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You might recall Donald Trump gave the owners, the Batista Brothers, boatloads of money from the US taxpayers this year when he dumped out mountains of it upon US farmers, as flipping creepy as this sounds!
Gangsters, thugs
JBS: The Brazilian butchers who took over the world
By Andrew Wasley , Alexandra Heal , Lucy Michaels , Dom Phillips , André Campos , Diego Junqueira , Claire Smyth , Rory Winters
Published July 2 2019
If you eat meat, you probably buy products made by one Brazilian company. A company with such power it can openly admit to having bribed more than 1,000 politicians and continue to grow despite scandal after scandal. And you’ve probably never heard of it.
Meat is now the new commodity, controlled by just a handful of gigantic firms which together wield unprecedented control over global food production. The Bureau has been investigating the biggest of all: JBS, a Brazilian company which slaughters a staggering 13 million animals every single day and has annual revenue of $50bn.
When it comes to scandals, you can take your pick — during its rapid rise to become the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS and its network of subsidiaries have been linked to allegations of high-level corruption, modern-day “slave labour” practices, illegal deforestation, animal welfare violations and major hygiene breaches. In 2017 its holding company agreed to pay one of the biggest fines in global corporate history — $3.2bn — after admitting bribing hundreds of politicians. Yet the company’s products remain on supermarket shelves across the world, and its global dominance only looks set to grow further.
In a two-part investigation published today, the Bureau revealed in partnership with the Guardian and Repórter Brasil that Amazon deforestation and dirty meat are very much part of how JBS has done business. Today we lift the lid on the company itself, and ask: what is the true cost of cheap meat?
More:
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-07-02/jbs-brazilian-butchers-took-over-the-world
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Farm Bailout Paid to Brazilian Meat Processor Angers Lawmakers
Lawmakers want to know why a Brazilian-owned company got payments from a program aimed to help American farmers weather President Trump’s trade war.
By Maggie Haberman and Alan Rappeport
Feb. 7, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, confident that the Chinese government will follow through on its agreement to buy more American agriculture, plans to shutter its bailout program for farmers hurt by tariffs.
But allegations of unfairness and other criticisms continue to dog the $28 billion initiative, which President Trump created to ease the economic hardship on rural America, which constitutes a large portion of his political base.
What was meant to be a financial lifeline for struggling farmers has been widely derided by critics as a corporate bailout for big agriculture companies and those who live in metropolitan areas but own farms in rural America. The program has also been attacked for providing financial support to American subsidiaries of foreign agriculture companies that operate in the United States.
For months, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has been pressing the Trump administration to explain payments to a Brazilian-owned company with a troubled past.
About $67 million in bailout funds have gone to JBS USA, the subsidiary of JBS S.A., a Brazilian company that is the world’s biggest meat-processing firm.
Lawmakers have argued that a company with foreign-held ownership should be getting more scrutiny, particularly one that encountered legal troubles three years ago. In 2017, two of JBS S.A.’s former top executives, brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in Brazil.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/us/politics/farm-bailout-jbs.html
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