{"id":145876,"date":"2019-10-28T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=145876"},"modified":"2019-11-04T09:53:19","modified_gmt":"2019-11-04T09:53:19","slug":"german-appetite-for-beef-eats-into-brazilian-rainforest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/10\/german-appetite-for-beef-eats-into-brazilian-rainforest\/","title":{"rendered":"German Appetite for Beef Eats into Brazilian Rainforest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Block House steak restaurant in Germany
Ulrich Baumgarten\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Oct 2019 – <\/em>Germany imported \u20ac216m worth of Brazilian beef over five years from meat companies linked to major deforestation in the Amazon and other vital areas.<\/p>\n

The newspaper Welt Am Sonntag<\/a><\/em> used data collated by the Bureau to calculate that German restaurants and retail chains used 40,000 tonnes of beef imported from the Brazilian giants JBS, Marfrig and Minerva. Some of Germany\u2019s biggest brands were found to be among the direct buyers, including the T\u00f6nnies meat company and the Block House steak restaurant chain.<\/p>\n

Amazon deforestation was found to have almost quadrupled in the year to July, which has been widely blamed on the pro-agribusiness and climate-sceptic rhetoric of the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s imports accounted for about 7% of the half a million tonnes of Brazilian beef imported by the EU from JBS, Marfrig and Minerva over five years, which was worth at least \u20ac2.7bn.<\/p>\n

Our recent investigations with the Guardian<\/em> and Rep\u00f3rter Brasil <\/em>into JBS and Marfrig found that both companies had recently undermined their own pledges<\/a> by buying from suppliers who had broken rules around deforestation. Separate unprecedented research has linked the beef export supply chains of JBS, Marfrig and Minerva to up to 500 sq km of Amazon deforestation<\/a> every year.<\/p>\n

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Welt Am Sonntag’s front page: \u201cBilliges Fleisch f\u00fcr Deutschland auf Kosten von Brasiliens Wald\u201d or \u201cCheap meat for Germany at the expense of Brazil\u2019s forests\u201d
Welt Am Sonntag<\/p><\/div>\n

Environmental destruction in Brazil is not limited to the Amazon, however. The beef imported into Germany is most likely to come from the Cerrado, an extremely biodiverse savannah in the southeast of Brazil, according to Trase, the supply chain consultancy behind the research. Trase found that an area of protected land the size of 350 football fields is converted every year into pasture to feed the German appetite for Brazilian beef. The Cerrado is being destroyed faster than the Amazon, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.<\/p>\n

Germany imports only a small proportion of its beef from Brazil \u2014 the bulk comes from the EU.<\/p>\n

T\u00f6nnies told Welt Am Sonntag<\/em> that, according to its knowledge, its imported beef does not \u201ccome from a rainforest area\u201d.<\/p>\n

The director of Block House said the industry was aware of the deforestation problem, but that some companies continued to import the Brazilian beef because it was cheaper. The steakhouse chain said it imported very little of its beef from Brazil, but planned to stop altogether.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thebureauinvestigates.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Oct 2019 – Germany imported \u20ac216m worth of Brazilian beef over five years from meat companies linked to major deforestation in the Amazon and other vital areas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":145877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,180,51,53,170],"tags":[536,547,239,232,120,794,331,354,401,1268,267,739,866,541,234,109,287,103,985,126,172,75],"class_list":["post-145876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-brics","category-europe","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","category-animal-rights-vegetarianism","tag-amazonia","tag-brazil","tag-brics","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict","tag-deforestation","tag-development","tag-economics","tag-environment","tag-european-union","tag-geopolitics","tag-germany","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-media","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-racism","tag-social-justice","tag-violence","tag-west","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}