Boi com chip na Amazônia is an articleoriginally published by G1, by Paula Salati and Gustavo Wanderley, on July 23rd, 2024.
In an attempt to ensure that the meat consumed in Brazil and exported abroad is free from deforestation, an innovative project has been implemented in the Amazon, tracking cattle from birth to slaughter using state-of-the-art technology. The tannery Durli Leathers, renowned for producing traced leather, is also part of this important project.
Brazil's Challenge as the Largest Meat Exporter
"I don't want to build a white elephant. My life is in Pará. Everything I've invested is here. And I started to think that, in a short time, I might be excluded and no one will want to buy meat from the Amazon anymore," says cattle farmer and owner of Frigorífico Rio Maria, Roberto Paulinelli.
G1 visited his farm in Rio Maria, Pará, the state with the second largest cattle herd in the country and the largest in the Amazon, to find out about a system for identifying cattle with chips that aims to guarantee deforestation-free meat.
When the Meatpackers Started Monitoring Farms
As the world's largest beef exporter, Brazil is under pressure to demonstrate that the product, especially when it comes from the Amazon, is not linked to areas of illegal deforestation. The region has the highest concentration of cattle in the country.
The main challenges are:
- Brazil does not currently have a national public policy for tracking cattle - the federal government says it has plans to create one;
- An agreement between slaughterhouses da Amazônia and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office provides for the monitoring of farms, but adherence is voluntary;
- What's more, most companies only check the situation of their direct suppliers, i.e. the farms that fatten the steers;
- There is not the same verification of indirect suppliers, which are generally the farms that raise calves and lean steers. This is the bottleneck that chip tracking aims to solve.
The use of this technology is one of the possible solutions. But, for the time being, what exists in this sense are private and recent initiatives.
The pilot tracking project adopted on Paulinelli's farm in Pará was created a year ago by the geotechnology company Niceplanet, in partnership with the SBcert certification company.
So far, it covers 150 farms and slaughterhouses in Pará, Tocantins, Goiás and São Paulo - including large companies such as Frigol and Minerva.
Paulinelli buys cattle to raise and fatten on his farm and therefore deals with many indirect suppliers. For this reason, he has encouraged these producers to also trace their cattle.
"We're feeling that the restrictions against the Amazon are getting tighter and tighter," says the cattle farmer who, as well as selling meat to Brazilian companies, exports to other countries, mainly China.
The European Union has been tougher on this issue. From 2025, companies that stay in the EU will be banned from buying products from deforested areas.
China has also started to move. In 2021, the Chinese Meat Association (CMA), which includes companies, the government and researchers, published rules to prevent the import of products associated with deforestation. The rules, however, have yet to come into force.
Legal meat
slaughterhouses began to monitor its suppliers in 2009, the year that Greenpeace published a report known as the "Amazon cattle spree", denouncing companies that bought cattle from illegally deforested land.
At the time, large supermarket chains, restaurants, clothing, footwear and car brands boycotted the purchase of leather and meat from the Amazon.
In the face of strong pressure, the large slaughterhouses in the Amazon signed Conduct Adjustment Agre ements (TACs) with the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF) that same year, pledging not to buy cattle from deforested areas. The initiative became known as Carne Legal.
The agreements are voluntary and only cover slaughterhouses - cattle farmers don't take part. So far, Carne Legal has been joined by 130 companies from five states in the Legal Amazon: Acre, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Pará and Rondônia.
"Today, Carne Legal reaches 85% of the slaughterhouses that have a significant presence in the market," says public prosecutor Daniel Azeredo, who has been working on the program since the beginning.
Boi na Linha
The implementation of Carne Legal during these 15 years has been quite complex and has come up against many technical issues.
"Each slaughterhouse, for example, had a different way of looking at deforestation and indigenous land. So, when it came to monitoring, there were farmers who were blocked by one slaughterhouse, but not by another," says agricultural engineer Lisandro Inakake, project manager for Agricultural Chains at the Institute for Forest and Agricultural Management and Certification (Imaflora).
Because of this, in 2018, Imaflora and the MPF began to unify criteria for verifying farms, which resulted in the launch of the Boi na Linha Protocol in 2020.
This set of rules requires companies to check, in addition to illegal deforestation, whether farms have slave labor and whether they overlap with indigenous or quilombola land or conservation units.
The information is obtained by cross-referencing satellite images with data from various documents, such as the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), the Animal Transit Guide (GTA), Ibama's environmental embargoes, the slave labor dirty list, among others.
The data is verified by independent auditing companies and analyzed by the MPF, which also carries out investigations with Ibama, says Azeredo.
The Problem of the Indirect Supplier
Today, most of the slaughterhouses have only developed tools to check the socio-environmental situation of their direct suppliers, i.e. the farms that fatten the cattle and sell them directly to them.
But there is no verification of the properties that raise and breed the oxen, i.e. the indirect suppliers.
"Sometimes the animal passes through four or five farms before arriving at the property it's going to sell to slaughterhouse. So we're only looking at the last one. We need to look at the others," says the prosecutor.
Azeredo says that in the TACs signed between 2009 and 2010, it was agreed that slaughterhouses would also look for a solution to monitor breeding and rearing farms. "But as there is no tool for this today, the obligation remains with the direct [supplier]," explains the prosecutor.
Inakake, from Imaflora, says that 30% of the 50,000 rural properties in the Amazon have some non-compliance with the Boi na Linha protocol.
"The majority of these 30% are indirect suppliers or farms that sell to slaughterhouse without a TAC," he says.
For Azeredo, Brazil will only be able to accurately monitor the entire cattle production chain with individual animal traceability, from birth onwards.
What the ox's 'CPF' looks like
Roberto Paulinelli, the Rio Maria producer, has been monitoring indirect suppliers since 2010, when he signed the TAC with the MPF, as he also owns slaughterhouse.
But the control was done only with documents: it wasn't until July 2023 that earrings and chips were introduced, which allow us to know where each ox came from.
The initiative is known as Primi, which stands for Individual Traceability and Indirect Monitoring Project, created by the geotechnology company Niceplanet, in partnership with the certification company SBcert.
How important is individual identification? Today, the only way to control the entry and exit of cattle from farms is through the Animal Transit Guide (GTA). However, this document only identifies where the groups of cattle came from, but not the origin of each one. When the batches arrive at the properties, they are mixed up, causing control of their origin to be lost.
Brazil even has an official individual identification system, the Brazilian System for Individual Identification of Cattle and Buffaloes, or Sisbov. But this system is linked to sanitary control, and not to combating deforestation.
Sisbov was created 22 years ago by the Ministry of Agriculture to comply with the rules for exports to the European Union. Anyone who wants to sell meat to the EU needs two things: authorization from the bloc and entry into Sisbov, which gives a number to each steer.
But those who don't sell to the European Union can register steers with Sisbov.
It was because of this ease that Niceplanet decided to adopt this "CPF" of cattle as the starting point for tracking with chips. Jordan Carvalho, the company's director, explains that he didn't want to create an identification system out of thin air, without any national validation.
In a system called SMGeo Indirect, Niceplanet links each steer's Sisbov number to the farm's environmental, land and labor situation, based on the Boi na Linha Protocol.
When a producer enters SMGeo Indirect, he can search for data on the farm he wants to buy cattle from. If that farm has no socio-environmental blockages, he can proceed with the sale.
From there, he asks the Ministry of Agriculture to issue the Sisbov numbers and has them engraved on earrings and chips, which will be placed in the steers' ears.
When it comes to registering the cattle, the farm includes the data of each steer in the same system: which farm it came from, weight, date of birth, etc.
How much does it cost to track
As there is no public policy or national traceability model, there is also no well-established estimate of how much this process costs.
What we do know are the values of individual initiatives, such as Primi's.
To make the earrings and chips, Paulinelli had a one-off cost of R$7 per steer. Certification costs R$13 per animal.
The electronic stick that reads the information from the chip is more expensive, costing R$5,000.
Farms also need to have pens or trunks, which are structures that hold the animals while they receive the accessories. The cost varies greatly: the simplest ones can cost around R$20,000, while the more structured ones, such as the hydraulic one, can cost R$100,000 or more.
The advantage is that many cattle farms already have pens because they need this equipment to vaccinate their animals.
Solutions for Small Producers
For large livestock farmers, it doesn't cost much to implement the chip traceability system, as it is diluted in the companies' costs.
For smaller farmers, there are cheaper alternatives to individual identification, says cattle farmer Mauro Lúcio Costa, who also owns farms in Pará.
"[You can do] traceability with an earring and a tattoo. The tattoo doesn't cost anything, you buy a tattoo artist, which is a cheap tool, and mark the ear," says Costa.
"You can also put an earring and what we call a botton. The botton is the same as the chip, in the same way, there just won't be any electronics inside," he adds, explaining that any traceability must necessarily have two identifiers, because if one is lost, there's another to guarantee it.
Costa has been traveling around the state to teach small cattle farmers how to monitor suppliers. What he has been telling these producers is that traceability brings advantages in business management.
When a cattle farmer identifies a steer, he can find out how long it takes the animal to gain weight, which animal tends to get sicker, which supplier has the best genetics, among other data, says Mauro Lúcio. This allows the cattle farmer to improve his management.
"The ideal thing is to put the chip in. It minimizes, zeroes out the margin for error. The stick reads the data and it's already in the system. When you only have the earring, it's common to make a mistake when writing down the number," he says.
"The chip makes the process more expensive because of the electronic stick, but you have to think that it lasts for many years. We'd have to find a way to make it feasible for a group of producers," he says.
Brazil Needs Public Policy
For traceability to become accessible to everyone, the state will need to mobilize. This is what livestock farmers and environmentalists heard by G1 over the last four months argue.
According to them, it will be necessary to create a national public policy that provides incentives and structure for rural producers.
In May, G1 spoke to Agriculture Minister Carlos Fávaro about this issue. He said that the government had set up a working group that month to discuss the issue.
"We're going to listen to the producers, the industry, slaughterhouses, the tanneries and also the buyers. Because there's no point in us saying 'this is my model' if it doesn't serve the buyers. We need to be connected to the world to guarantee Brazil's access to markets and profitability for the whole chain," said Fávaro.
During the 2023 Climate Conference (COP) in Dubai, the governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho, promised to trace all 24 million oxen in the state by 2026, with an eye on COP 2030, which will be held in the capital Belém.
The Pará state government told G1 that, in order to achieve its goal, it has developed the Bovine Traceability program, which is due to start this month.
Participation of Durli Leathers
Durli Leathers, one of Brazil's leading tanneries, has joined the traceability project. Committed to sustainability, the company adopts rigorous geomonitoring practices, ensuring that all the raw materials used in its products comply with the environmental criteria established by the project.
Conclusion
The technology for tracking cattle in the Amazon represents a significant step forward in the fight against deforestation and in promoting sustainable practices in livestock farming. The participation of committed companies such as Durli Leathers reinforces the importance of traceability in the production chain and contributes to environmental conservation.
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