Brazilian packers sign Greenpeace agreement
08/10/2009
Executives from Brazil's four biggest meat and leather groups have met representatives of non governmental organisation Greenpeace in São Paulo.
At the meeting, the meat companies (JBS-Friboi, Bertin, Marfrig and Minerva) signed an agreement confirming their commitment to making sure that the suppliers of their meat and hides were raising no cattle on illegally cleared land in Amazon regions. They will implement a registration process for all livestock farmers in sensitive areas, committing them to keeping cattle away from illegally cleared land.
The meeting came four months after Greenpeace published a critical report of the Brazilian meat and leather industries because of the role of cattle farming in the destruction of the rainforest.
The governor of Mato Grosso, the Brazilian state with the largest livestock herd, Blairo Maggi, also took part in the meeting. He said his state had a goal of making sure all of the ranches in Mato Grosso were registered with a formal environmental protection plan within a year.
But Mr Maggi went on to say that livestock farmers in Mato Grosso would seek compensation for being unable to graze cattle on all of their land. He said Brazil was preparing to request this at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that will take place in Copenhagen in December. He argued that, if farmers are being asked to preserve the rainforest instead of raise cattle on a proportion of the land, they deserve to be paid for that work.
Marfrig president, Marcos Molina, said after the meeting that it represented an important step forward in the meat and leather supply chain's quest to adopt good sustainability practices in response to the demands of consumers in Brazil and overseas.
For his part, JBS-Friboi director José Batista Junior commented that the agreement ought to strengthen the position of Brazilian packers in the world market."
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