Cattle Laundering is Destroying the Amazon Rainforest

In the past decade, nearly all beef and other meat-packaging companies have made agreements to protect the Amazon rainforest, many of them legally binding. Countless regulations prohibit deforestation and keep companies from harming this invaluable ecosystem. On paper, the Amazon rainforest is one of the most protected areas on the planet.

Yet, deforestation is still a major problem. From August 1st, 2018, to July 31, 2021, more than 8.4 million acres disappeared from the Amazon, an area larger than the entire nation of Belgium. Every day, roughly 10,000 acres of rainforest vanish. 

Researchers believe they have uncovered one of the reasons behind the continued destruction of the Amazon: cattle laundering. Ranchers can move cattle from “dirty” ranches, which contribute to deforestation, to “clean” ranches, which do not. For example, a cow may be born and raised on a dirty ranch but brought to a clean one for fattening. By the time cattle arrive at the slaughterhouse, their path – and the damage they have caused – is obscured.

Cattle laundering is particularly successful because most slaughterhouses only look at their direct supplier, the last stop on a cow’s journey. As long as the last ranch they visited was clean, farmers could say they had met regulations, no matter how damaging the cow’s actual journey was. 

This is a large-scale problem for the Amazon. According to a recent study from Conservation Letters, between 2013 and 2018, meatpackers slaughtered 60.5 million cattle in the Amazon states of Mato Grosso, Pará, and Rondônia. More than 3 million of them, or roughly 5 percent, were raised at least partially in protected areas. 2.2 million of them traveled through ranches outside of protected areas before reaching slaughterhouses, indicating laundering.

Even worse, these numbers are likely underestimates, according to Holly Gibbs, a professor at the University of Washington Madison and one of the study’s authors. The data was gathered based on ranchers who published their numbers in a government database; it does not consider ranchers who may not document illegal activity. 

There is not much to be done about this pervasive problem besides tracking animals individually, an expensive and difficult proposition. For consumers, the best way to reduce cattle laundering is to eat less beef. Plant-based options have become readily available in stores and apps like Food Monster and many restaurants. Supporting the environmentally harmful beef industry is not our only option.

Within the industry, however, things look bleaker. “If we wanted to end laundering, we would need animal-level traceability,” Gibbs said. “Until we keep track of the individual animals, some level of laundering will keep happening.”

Sign this petition to help save the Amazon rainforest.

Related Content:

• Beef Production is Killing the Amazon Rainforest
• Beef Sold By Major Retailers Linked to Deforestation in the Amazon
• Time-lapse Video Shows Shocking Scale of Amazon Deforestation
• Toxic Oil Spill in Ecuador Impacts Protected Areas in the Amazon Rainforest
• Pope Calls for Action on the Amazon Rainforest!
• Amazon Rainforest is Now Emitting More Carbon Dioxide than it Absorbs

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