- Agricultural expansion in Brazil’s Pará and Mato Grosso states has destroyed 27 million hectares (67 million acres) of jaguar habitat — an area the size of the U.K. — with 5 million hectares (12 million acres) cleared between 2014 and 2023, most of it illegally.
- A report by Global Witness links some of this deforestation to indirect suppliers of JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, which has failed to fully uphold its pledge to eliminate illegal deforestation from its supply chain by 2025.
- The report highlights weak enforcement of environmental laws and recent attempts by local governments to reverse antideforestation policies, as agribusiness continues to wield major political and economic power.
- With Brazil hosting the COP30 climate summit later this year, campaigners are urging governments and corporations to fulfill deforestation pledges, improve supply chain traceability, and address agriculture’s growing role in greenhouse gas emissions.
Agricultural expansion in two Brazilian states has cleared a U.K -sized area of jaguar habitat, nearly a fifth of which occurred in the last decade alone, a new report shows.
About 27 million hectares (67 million acres) of wild jaguar habitat have been lost as of 2023 in the Amazonian states of Pará and Mato Grosso, with 5 million hectares (12 million acres) deforested just in the period from 2014-2023, according to the report by environmental and human rights advocacy group Global Witness. It attributes part of this loss to ranches indirectly supplying cattle to meatpacking giant JBS, with nearly all of the deforestation since 2013 being illegal.
The report comes amid pushback against environmental enforcement efforts at the state level in Brazil, and as the country prepares to host the U.N.’s annual climate summit, COP30, in November.
Jaguars (Panthera onca) need intact forests to live and hunt in, and are a keystone species, which means that any change to their territories affects the entire ecosystem they inhabit. The Amazon Rainforest remains the last major stronghold for the species listed as near-threatened on the IUCN Red List.
“We wanted to show not just that deforestation is a huge climate threat, because it destroys forests on which we rely for all the ecosystem services, but also the impact it has on iconic species and all types of biodiversity,” said report coordinator Alexandria Reid, head of forests at Global Witness.
To calculate the deforestation of jaguar habitat, the researchers overlaid historical data on jaguar habitat from the IUCN Red List with 2014-2023 land-use change data from MapBiomas, a multidisciplinary mapping initiative.
Mato Grosso and Pará are major farming states in Brazil, with Mato Grosso leading in both soy production and head of cattle. The two states together also account for around 60% of deforestation recorded since 1987 across the nine states that make up the Brazilian Amazon, according to MapBiomas data.
Global Witness found that 89% of the 5 million hectares cleared between 2014 and 2023 was done without the requisite legal permits.
A separate data set showed that agricultural land in jaguar territory expanded by 5 million hectares during this period. But it’s not clear how much of this new farmland resulted directly from forest clearing, as the researchers didn’t overlay the data sets, Reid said.
A supply chain issue
The report links some of the jaguar habitat loss to JBS, the world’s biggest meatpacker, which has been dogged by environmental scandals for years. In 2021, JBS pledged to eradicate illegal deforestation from its supply chain by 2025, but Global Witness says its findings show the company isn’t sticking to its commitments.
Data suggest that between 2013 and 2023, a ranch in Mato Grosso identified as an indirect supplier of JBS was responsible for clearing 1,200 hectares (nearly 3,000 acres) of jaguar territory in the Meandros do Rio Aragua Environmental Protection Area. This is a conservation area of nearly 360,000 hectares (about 890,000 acres) straddling the border region between Mato Grosso, Tocantins and Goiás states, what Global Witness calls a “unique ecological haven for wild animals such as jaguars, deer, birds, turtles, and other species.”
During that period, the ranch was fined multiple times for illegal deforestation.
Analyzing cattle transport records between 2018 and 2023, the report found that 75% of the farms on jaguar habitat identified as JBS suppliers were in violation of Brazil’s Forest Code. The code requires rural landowners to preserve a portion of the land in its natural state, known as the legal reserve. In the Amazon, the legal reserve accounts for 80% of a property; in the Cerrado savanna biome, it ranges from 20-35%.
When asked for comment, JBS referred Mongabay to the response it gave Global Witness, in which it refuted the NGO’s findings, saying that many of the farms identified are not in its supplier base and the data used are limited. JBS said it complies with Brazilian laws and policies and reiterated its commitment to eradicating illegal deforestation from its supply chain by 2025.
According to Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas’s founder and general coordinator, a comprehensive deforestation alert system launched by the platform in 2019 has improved the capacity of companies like JBS to remove illegal deforestation from their supply chain. MapBiomas Alerta compiles alerts from different deforestation tracking systems in Brazil and identifies all forest clearing across the country, even if with a slight delay.
“The tendency is for [illegal deforestation] to be wiped out,” Azevedo told Mongabay in a video interview. “There’s nowhere to hide now when it comes to the direct supply chain. The problem remains with indirect suppliers.”
An opportunity for action at COP30
Reid and other environmentalists say they’re worried by a rollback in commitments from both corporations and governments when it comes to ending deforestation.
Earlier this year, JBS’s global chief sustainability officer, Jason Weller, dialed back the company’s environmental commitments, calling its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2040 an “aspiration” rather than a promise. Meanwhile, an investigation published last month found that JBS is unlikely to meet its pledge of eradicating illegal deforestation from its extensive supply chain by the end of this year.
At the state level across Brazil, there have been recent efforts to unravel a moratorium adopted by industry two decades ago to not trade in soy grown on deforested Amazon land. In the Amazonian state of Rondônia, authorities recently approved a law pardoning land grabbers who illegally farmed soy and raised cattle in a protected reserve.
The agribusiness presence at COP30 is expected to be significant, much like the oil and gas turned out for COP28 in Dubai in 2023. That’s because agribusiness wields enormous economic and political clout in Brazil, in addition to being a major greenhouse gas emitter and deforester. In 2023, 28% of Brazil’s GHG emissions came directly from agriculture and 46% from land-use change, which almost invariably means deforestation. And according to MapBiomas, 97% of native forest loss in the last six years was driven by agriculture.
“Once Brazil gets deforestation under control, agriculture will be the sector that emits the most, specifically cattle,” said Karen Silverwood-Cope, climate director at the World Resources Institute (WRI) Brazil. “There is going to be an important discussion about action on the agriculture and livestock agenda [at COP30].”
Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a Brazil-based coalition of NGOs, called on agribusiness corporations to take their stated obligations more seriously. “They are preoccupied with the climate, which is good, but it would be much better if they delivered on their commitments,” Astrini told Mongabay by phone.
“[Agribusiness players] are going to face a lot of pressure at the conference,” he added, especially when it comes to putting in place a cattle traceability system, considered a key tool to prevent cattle raised on deforested land don’t enter the supply chain.
“Deforestation is a solvable issue, but it’s one where there is stalling, a lack of political will to actually meet the global agreement to end forest loss by 2030,” said Global Witness’s Reid, referring to the landmark pledge reached at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021.
She said she hopes that at COP30 countries will put forward plans “to actually deliver [on] their commitments when it comes to forest loss.”
Banner image: A female jaguar in the north region of the Pantanal. Image courtesy of Xavier Muñoz/Jaguar Identification Project.
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