Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World: A recent visitor to the Amazon rainforest was surprised by the animal that was most conspicuous: instead of exotic jaguars, the region was populated by “the humpbacked, floppy-eared, glossy white Nelore cow, the ultimate conqueror of the frontier.” As the Brazilian economy was transformed into the world’s main provider of beef in the last two decades, the rainforest that houses 10 percent of the world’s animal species has been set alight to open the way for millions of grazing cows. Current estimates suggest that there are more than twice as many cows as people in the Brazilian part of the Amazon—around 63 and 28 million, respectively.
When President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva started his first term in office in 2003, Brazilian exports of frozen beef ranked third in the world by volume, representing around 11 percent of the total. By the end of his second term in 2010, Brazil ranked first, accounting for 23 percent of all frozen beef exported worldwide. In quantity, these exports increased from 317 to 781 thousand tonnes. Over the following decade, Brazilian beef supremacy deepened: in 2022 Brazil was the origin of 32 percent of all frozen beef traded internationally, exporting almost twice as much as India, the second largest exporter. The rise of Brazil as the stockyard of the world was tightly connected to the rise of China as an economic superpower: Chinese imports of frozen beef surged between 2002 and 2022 from eleven thousand to over two million tonnes.
A yet more dramatic story can be told about soya. The Brazilian share of global exports of this bean rose from about a quarter in 2003 to around half since 2018. A substantial portion of this commodity is used to produce animal feed for other countries’ stockyards, earning the title of an emergent “Brazil-China soy-meat complex” from researchers looking to describe these shifting global agri-food relations. The two commodities—beef and soya beans—have spread across Brazil’s hinterland like wildfire, and much of their production does not abide by local environmental regulations (see the geographical expansion of the two activities in Figures 1 and 2, below). A 2020 investigation by Raoni Rajão and others, which compiled a comprehensive dataset with information on 815 thousand rural properties in the Amazon and Cerrado (the Brazilian savanna), concluded that “roughly 20 percent of soy exports and at least 17 percent of beef exports from both biomes to the EU may be contaminated with illegal deforestation.” (The shares may be even higher for exports to other destinations with more lax regulations.)
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