BELEM, Brazil — Maria Gorete, who just began ranching three years ago, is doing something new with her 76 head of cattle in the Brazilian countryside near the town of Novo Repartimento.
She’s piercing their ears.
Their new jewelry — ear tags, actually — will track their movements throughout their lives as part of an initiative aimed at slowing deforestation in the Brazilian state of Para. Depending on how well it works, it’s the kind of solution the world needs more of to slow climate change, the subject of annual United Nations talks just a few hours away in Belem.
With about 20 million cattle in Para, it’s a mammoth task. Some of them are on big farms closer to cities, but others are in remote areas where farmers have been cutting down Amazon rainforest to make room for their pastures. That’s a problem for climate change because it means trees that absorb pollution are being replaced by cattle that emit methane, a powerful planet-warming gas.
Brazil has lost about 339,685 square kilometers (131,153 square miles) of mature rainforest since 2001 — an area roughly the size of Germany — and more than a third of that loss was in Para, according to Global Forest Watch. Para alone accounts for about 14% of all rainforest loss recorded worldwide over the last 24 years.
Gorete, with her small herd, said the tagging hasn’t been much of a hassle. And she sees the program as a good thing. It will let her sell her beef to companies and countries whose consumers want to know where it came from.
“With this identification, it opens doors to the world,” said Gorete, who before cattle ranching cultivated acai and cacao. “It adds value to the animals.”
Cows can move to several farms in their lifetime — born on one pasture, sold to a different farmer, or two or three or more, until they’ve grown to their full weight and are sold to a processor, said Marina Piatto, executive director of the Brazilian agriculture and conservation NGO Imaflora.
Tracking those movements effectively can be a way to discourage deforestation. That’s where the tagging comes in.
Starting next year, all cattle being transported in Para have to be tagged. Each animal actually gets a tag in each ear. One is a written number that is registered with the government in an official database. The other is an electronic chip that links to the same information as the number registered to the cow — like when and where it was born, where it was raised, the owner, the breed and more. By 2027, all cattle in Para, including cattle born on ranches in the state, have to have tags.
Once a tag is removed, it’s broken and can’t be put back, a measure to help avoid fraud.
When the cattle moves, owners are required to report those movements and buyers are required to log the transaction. To be able to sell their animals, ranchers must have tags and a clean history. Locations registered with the government where the animals have been can be checked against satellite images to detect illegal deforestation, or against maps that show Indigenous territories that are supposed to be off-limits for cattle.
“The only solution is individual cattle traceability because then you can know for each movement where that cattle has been and if it has been in a place that has been deforested in the past,” said José Otavio Passos, the Brazilian Amazon director with The Nature Conservancy.
Mauro Lucio, 60, has 2,600 cattle on his farm in Paragominas about 290 kilometers (180 miles) south of Belem. He said the new tagging program was an easy transition for him because he’s been tagging his cattle since 2000. He did it to track his own herd, but he sees the benefit of the government now being involved.
“For me, this is the same tool,” he said.
Gorete, the cattle rancher near Novo Repartimento, said she doesn’t believe ranchers will be able to skirt the system once it’s fully in place.
“The guy who doesn’t have identification of his animals is not going to be selling,” she said.
The government will pay for the tags for farms with 100 head of cattle or fewer and ranchers with anything beyond that pay by themselves, said Passos, of The Nature Conservancy. Lucio said the last price he paid for tags was just under 9 Brazilian reals (US$1.70).
JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, is donating 2 million tags to the effort. The company, which is among several that have been fined or faced lawsuits for buying cattle raised illegally on deforested land, said traceability of cattle can help address concerns about deforestation. JBS says it has a “zero-tolerance policy” for illegal deforestation and takes several steps to ensure its supply chain doesn’t contribute to deforestation.
Passos said it’s important to have industry players on board. “We have never had such a unique window of opportunity where you have all the sectors, the cattle ranchers, the meatpackers, the industry, the government, the NGOs, all hurtling around the same objective,” he said.
Even if meat producers are backing a legal system for cattle tracing, though, there will always be ways to get around laws, said Piatto, of Imaflora, because “illegal is cheaper, it’s easier.”
Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch, an organization focused on rainforest protection, said land clearing is carried out “in a sophisticated way by well-funded crime syndicates, not by small landholders in the majority by any means.”
He said it’s been easy for those groups to get around current efforts to stop the clearing. He called the new tagging a step in the right direction, but said the most determined people may still be capable of getting around the new rules.
The committee that has been coordinating between government, industry and producers has been working on ways to prevent fraud and use law enforcement most effectively, said Fernando Sampaio, sustainability director of the Brazilian Association of Meat Exporting Industries. For that, they have to know where to look; for instance, if a farm is selling more animals than its size would suggest, that might be a red flag.
Sampaio characterized a small minority of farms as being run by criminal operations.
“These are the guys that need to be excluded from the supply chain,” he said.
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Associated Press editor Peter Prengaman contributed reporting from New York. Data reporter M.K. Wildeman contributed from Hartford, Connecticut.
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Follow Melina Walling on X at @MelinaWalling and on Bluesky at @melinawalling.bsky.social.
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