(Bloomberg) — McDonald’s Corp. may be linked to deforestation and labor abuses in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands and the Amazon rainforest, which plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate, according to a report released Wednesday by Reporter Brasilan independent research group focused on environmental and labor issues.
In its report, Reporter Brasil reviewed several cases in which beef from illegally cleared ranches was mixed with that from farms to hide its true origin and then sent to slaughterhouses owned by companies that supply McDonald’s. Unions in Europe are leaning on the report to demand that McDonald’s begin annually disclosing detailed risks of human rights and environmental abuses in its supply chain, citing a French surveillance law that environmental groups hope will be a model for others. countries.
McDonald’s declined to comment before the report was released. The website of the company says that more than 99% of the beef it sourced by the end of 2020 “supported deforestation-free supply chains.” The fast food giant has had difficulty stopping its huge carbon footprint.
Brazil’s beef supply chain, one of the most complex in the world, is the main culprit behind deforestation in the Amazon, which reached a 15-year high in 2021. At one end of the chain are 2.5 million ranchers, many of them in remote corners of Brazil without government protection, control or enforcement. On the other hand, there are corporate buyers in 80 countries. JBS SA, Marfrig Global Foods SA and Minerva SA – Brazil’s largest beef exporters – say they set the highest standards to weed out bad practices from their supply chain, but one Bloomberg Green research in January showed how a cow’s journey from birth to feedlot is left almost completely uncontrolled.
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In the report published on Wednesday, Reporter Brasil maintains that JBS slaughterhouses in the Brazilian cities of Juina and Juara bought cattle in 2018 and 2019 from a rancher who transferred animals from a property seized by the environmental regulator to another with a clean record before make the sale. JBS has supplied McDonald’s with hamburger meat, but never from those specific plants. At least five other ranchers who sold to JBS’s Confresa unit, Marfrig’s Varzea Grande and Tucuma plants, and Minerva’s Mirassol D’Oeste plant between 2017 and 2020 used “similar animal transfer strategies,” Reporter Brasil reported. The research group, which examines public records to piece together supply chains, also said that in 2019 it traced shipments to JBS’s Campo Grande unit to a farm where workers were allegedly mistreated, with no access to clean water.
JBS said the ranches mentioned in the report were never registered as direct suppliers or in compliance with labor and environmental laws at the time of purchase.
Minerva said the alleged illegal farm mentioned in the report had been blocked from its list of direct suppliers since 2015. Marfrig said nothing regarding farms that activated some of its monitoring systems, acknowledging that obtaining information regarding indirect suppliers, or suppliers of its suppliers, remains a great challenge.
In all cases, it is impossible to know if beef from any of the animals in question actually made it to McDonald’s restaurants. That’s because animals are not individually tracked in Brazil from origin to slaughter, and transport documents that might shed some light on the herd’s movement are restricted by the government.
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McDonald’s Linked to Amazon Deforestation in New Report
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