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Stock indices let Brazil meatpackers shed ties to deforestation, draw investors

A hundred and twenty-one million dollars. That’s one-third of the 2019 net profit of the world’s largest meat producer, JBS. It’s also the amount that JBS, together with competitors Marfrig and Minerva, raised on Brazil’s capital market thanks to the stamp of approval from the Brazilian stock exchange. But as with many things in the world of →

Por Fernanda Wenzel Naira Hofmeister Pedro Papini
6 de outubro de 2020

BlackRock’s $400m stake in Amazon meatpackers defies sustainability cred

Wall Street fund manager BlackRock administers 2.2 billion reais ($408 million) in shares in the three largest Brazilian meatpackers operating in the Amazon today. The cattle purchase and slaughter operations of JBS, Marfrig and Minerva involve 6.9 million hectares (17 million acres) of land at high risk of deforestation. That puts BlackRock’s investments at odds with →

Por Fernanda Wenzel Naira Hofmeister Pedro Papini
24 de setembro de 2020

Amazon meatpacking plants, a COVID-19 hotspot, may be ground zero for next pandemic

Between 2016 and 2020, 26 new cattle slaughterhouses were registered inside the Brazilian Amazon, bringing the total number of meatpackers in the region up to 183. This is worrisome news, given the fact that cattle farming is the largest contributing factor to deforestation in the Amazon, generates large quantities of greenhouse gases, and is responsible for one-third of cases of →

Por Fernanda Wenzel Naira Hofmeister Pedro Papini Juliana Lopes
11 de setembro de 2020

All talk, no walk: ‘Green’ financiers still support Amazon beef industry

In December 2015, after four years of negotiations, leaders of 195 nations decided to unite to slow down global warming. They signed the Paris Agreement, in which they committed to take measures that would contain the global temperature rise to 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Each nation defined its own targets for meeting this →

Por Fernanda Wenzel Naira Hofmeister Pedro Papini Juliana Lopes
13 de agosto de 2020

Paper maze and lack of transparency cloak investment in companies involved in Amazon deforestation

Last year, journalist Débora Gastal decided to start putting aside a nest egg so she will be comfortable in her golden years. At the age of 31, she joined the 13.5 million Brazilians with a private or supplementary pension plan—an investment option in which the bank uses clients’ funds to play the financial market and generate →

Por Fernanda Wenzel Naira Hofmeister Pedro Papini Juliana Lopes
11 de agosto de 2020

For Brazilian agribusiness, leaving the Amazon forested is ‘a problem’

The Brazilian state of Acre lost 688 square kilometers (265 square miles) of forest in 2019, up 55% from the previous year and the third-biggest expanse of deforestation among the country’s Amazonian states. But Assuero Doca Veronez, president of the Acre Agriculture Federation, is not troubled by this statistic. “For us, deforestation is a synonym →

Por Fernanda Wenzel
14 de abril de 2020