Coffee, Cocoa & Agricultural Commodities
Cattle agreements
Voluntary and legally binding commitments by Brazilian meatpackers to stop buying cattle linked to Amazon deforestation — the backbone of beef-sector zero-deforestation efforts since 2009.
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Agreements between Brazilian slaughterhouses and regulators or civil society restricting cattle purchases from deforested properties. The two pillars: the federal public prosecutors' Terms of Adjustment of Conduct (TACs), legally binding commitments excluding suppliers linked to illegal deforestation, slave labour or embargoed areas; and the G4 voluntary commitment (2009) by the four largest meatpackers — JBS, Marfrig, Minerva, Bertin — to avoid all post-2009 deforestation, legal or not.
References
G4 vs TAC scope (zero vs illegal deforestation); supplier-audit coverage; TACs covering only 14% of 2020 exports; indirect-supplier gap.
~70% of beef under zero-deforestation commitments by 2023 (company 40%, TAC 29%).
Overview
What it means
Signed in 2009 after Greenpeace's "Slaughtering the Amazon" campaign, the agreements made Brazil's cattle sector the testbed for commodity zero-deforestation governance. Monitoring systems (satellite-based property mapping against CAR rural registries) now audit direct suppliers with high coverage, and by 2023 roughly 70% of Brazilian beef exports sat under some zero-deforestation commitment.
The structural weakness is the indirect-supplier gap: cattle are laundered through intermediate ranches before reaching compliant final suppliers, undermining both TAC and G4 integrity — the focus of EU deforestation-regulation alignment work and full-traceability pilots.
How it is used
Meatpackers run geospatial supplier-screening systems; prosecutors audit TAC compliance; buyers and financiers condition contracts on agreement adherence; the model informs cocoa, soy and leather traceability frameworks.
Why it matters
Cattle agreements demonstrated that market-based instruments can police deforestation at continental scale — and their indirect-supplier loophole now defines the frontier of supply-chain due diligence.
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