Nelore cattle are the most common breed in Brazil, a leading exporter of beef. Since a third of Brazilians ever rescued from modern slavery worked in the cattle industry, this sector needs needs improved monitoring to rid supply chains of forced labor. Credit: Alf Ribeiro|Dreamstime.com.
Deforestation for cattle ranching in the Amazon has been a concern for decades. Less well-known is the fact that an estimated 40% of deforestation is carried out by workers subjected to modern slavery—a powerful link between human rights violations and environmental problems.
Researchers can assess deforestation with satellite images, but measuring the impact of policies to reduce forced labor is much harder. With colleagues at the Global Land Use and Environment Lab directed by Professor Holly Gibbs, AAE graduate student Tara Mittelberg (PhDx’26) is tackling this challenge. The research team assembled a unique, large dataset to examine how Brazil’s forced-labor policy works in practice.
“Brazil is often held up as a success story by international labor organizations,” says Mittelberg, whose AAE advisor is Professor Jeremy Foltz. “Our study is the first quantitative evaluation of its forced-labor policy that also helped us assess the human rights impact of global supply chains.”
Forced labor affects nearly 30 million people around the world, 7% of whom work in agriculture. In Brazil, which supplied 25% of global beef exports in 2022, a third of those ever rescued from modern slavery worked in the cattle industry. Since ranchers raise most of their animals by clearing the Amazon rainforest for pastureland, the cattle industry is also a major driver of deforestation.
To reduce modern slavery, Brazil’s Ministry of Labor established the “Dirty List” in 2004. It is a public list of employers whose workers are subjected to arduous working days, degrading working or living conditions, restricted movement or debt bondage. The ministry updates this list every six months and removes employer names after two years if they have paid fines and passed a labor inspection.
Members of the Gibbs Lab have downloaded online Dirty Lists and assembled a database of millions of cattle transactions for more than a decade. The transaction records come from sanitary monitoring forms that ranchers must file when they move animals between ranches and slaughterhouses.
For the new study, the researchers examined cattle transactions between 2011 and 2022 in four Amazon states, which account for one-third of Brazil’s cattle production. They matched seller and buyer identifiers in the transaction database to 121 Dirty Listed ranchers and more than 555,000 non-listed ranchers. This large dataset allowed Mittelberg to analyze if being added to the Dirty List caused changes in ranchers’ selling behavior.
The researchers were especially interested in sales to slaughterhouses owned by four large meatpackers in Brazil that account for 75% of exports. These companies signed the Public Livestock Commitment (PLC, formerly G4) in 2009 agreeing to purchase only cattle from ranchers not engaged in illegal deforestation and not on the Dirty List. Governments and private companies around the world carefully scrutinize PLC slaughterhouses before importing Brazilian beef and leather.
The analysis showed that Dirty Listed ranchers evaded forced-labor sanctions by either selling cattle to clean ranches, who then sold it to PLC slaughterhouses, or by selling to the 25% of slaughterhouses that did not sign the PLC. The volume of sales to clean “middleman” ranches was similar to the volume sold to PLC slaughterhouses before ranchers went on the Dirty List. These ranchers also returned to business as usual within six months of being removed from the list.
Field interviews showed that this cattle-laundering behavior typically costs ranchers between 1% and 14% of the finished animal value. Such a low penalty for being listed potentially limits the policy’s ability to deter forced labor in practice.
The team also analyzed three years of export data to show that countries including the United Kingdom, China and the European Union likely imported beef and leather products from Dirty Listed ranchers. This means cattle linked to modern slavery had entered both domestic and international supply chains.
“We would almost certainly find that global supply chains were even more contaminated with forced labor if we had analyzed the entire study period from 2011 to 2022,” says Mittelberg. “We believe this is the strongest quantitative evidence to date that Brazil’s forced-labor policy is not yet working as intended.”
Mittelberg is optimistic, however, that several ongoing initiatives could help change this. The government of one of the analyzed states is starting to use ear chips to better track cattle movements and improve monitoring and enforcement, following the example of Uruguay. Brazil’s legislature is also considering a new law that would allow the federal government to seize cattle of Dirty Listed ranchers. Both efforts could increase the policy’s ability to deter modern slavery by increasing the cost of being listed.
“Continued pressure from the public and private sector is critical for keeping global supply chains clean, and recent initiatives by the European Union that target both deforestation and forced labor are encouraging,” says Mittelberg. “My hope is that this work will add pressure and momentum to ongoing efforts to address human rights violations and deforestation in the Amazon.”