Brazil has made important progress under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in curbing the destruction of its forests. Yet when international delegates and journalists arrive in the Amazonian city of Belém for COP30, many are likely to ask why his administration hasn’t done more to tackle a principal threat to its climate ambitions: cattle-driven deforestation. 

Cattle ranching is the largest driver of forest loss in Brazil. It’s often sustained by forced labor and invasions of Indigenous lands—abuses that allow ranchers clearing forests to cut costs and increase profits. The opacity of Brazil’s cattle supply chains means that its leather and beef—with limited exceptions—cannot be reliably considered free of illegal deforestation or the rights abuses that remain widespread across the sector.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Lula administration already has the tools it needs to establish more effective tracing and monitoring within the cattle industry. It’s time to put them to use.

A report released by Climate Rights International last month identified recent cases in which ranches linked to deforestation, labor abuses, and/or invasions of Indigenous territories sold cattle into the supply chains of major meatpackers—which in turn sold leather into the supply chains of major international fashion and footwear brands, such as Adidas, Nike, Calvin Klein, and H&M, among others.

Brazilian meatpackers know they have a problem. Some have taken important steps to ensure they’re not buying directly from farms engaged in illegal deforestation or rights abuses. But for every direct supplier, they often have multiple indirect suppliers—farms whose cattle pass through one or more intermediary properties before reaching the slaughterhouse—and tens of thousands of these indirect suppliers remain unmonitored. As a result, even a slaughterhouse that buys only from “clean” ranches cannot guarantee that those animals weren’t raised partly on farms involved in deforestation or abuse. 

Several slaughterhouses have promised to establish new monitoring systems to address this gap. But these pledges ring hollow. The companies’ ability to identify their indirect suppliers depends on all of the suppliers in the supply chain voluntarily providing them with information about all their transactions—something experts in Brazil’s cattle sector say is highly unlikely.

The good news is that the Brazilian government has data systems that—if properly integrated—could largely solve the problem. These include public databases showing whether individual farms are complying with laws protecting the environment, workers, and Indigenous communities. They also include a non-public system, the Animal Transit Guide (GTA), which tracks cattle movements for sanitary purposes. What the country lacks, however, is a mechanism to integrate these systems effectively and at the scale needed to ensure supply chains are free of non-compliant farms.   

Encouragingly, several Brazilian states—including Pará and Minas Gerais—have developed systems with real potential to strengthen traceability and monitoring. Yet these state-level efforts remain confined to their own jurisdictions. And they risk segmenting the cattle sector, with cleaner supply chains emerging in some states to serve markets demanding deforestation-free products, while deforestation and related abuses continue unchecked elsewhere.

The federal government is the only entity with ready access to all the data needed for effective traceability at a national scale. By combining the GTA system with the compliance-monitoring databases, the Lula administration could create a national traceability and monitoring mechanism to track cattle movements throughout the country and assess the integrity of every company’s supply chains. According to officials and experts, such a mechanism could be operational within months.

Among the main beneficiaries of nationwide traceability and monitoring would be law-abiding ranchers who face unfair competition from others who engage in environmental crimes and human rights abuses, lowering costs for themselves while raising regulatory risks for the entire sector in key foreign markets. 

These include the United States, which prohibits the import of goods made with forced labor, and the European Union, where the forthcoming Deforestation Regulation and Forced Labour Regulation will restrict products linked to deforestation and forced labor. Without major improvements in traceability and monitoring, Brazil’s exports will struggle to meet these requirements.

Beyond trade and market access, the ecological consequences of continued deforestation should be an overriding concern for Brazilian ranchers and everyone who buys their products—and it will weigh heavily on discussions at COP30. Scientists warn that the Amazon is nearing a “tipping point” where further tree loss will disrupt the forest’s water cycle, drying vast regions, devastating local agriculture, and releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

The Lula administration and industry leaders face a choice: use the tools they already have to make supply chains transparent and sustainable—or allow illegal practices to reduce access to key markets and push the country, and the world, closer to ecological disaster.

This text does not necessarily represent the opinion of CartaCapital. 

This is a translated version. See original in Portuguese here.