The origin, supply chain, and deforestation footprint of Brazil’s beef exports

Though the international trade in agricultural commodities is worth more than 1.6 trillion USD per year, we still have a poor understanding of the supply chains connecting places of production and consumption and the socio-economic and environmental impacts of this trade. In this study, we provide the first wall-to-wall subnational map of the origin and supply chain of Brazilian meat, offal, and live cattle exports from 2015 to 2017, a trade worth more than 5.4 billion USD/year. Brazil is the world’s largest beef exporter, exporting approximately one-fifth of its production, and the sector has a notable environmental footprint, linked to one-fifth of all commodity-driven deforestation across the tropics. By combining official per-shipment trade records, slaughterhouse export licenses, subnational agricultural statistics, and data on the origin of cattle per slaughterhouse, we mapped the flow of cattle from more than 2,900 municipalities where cattle were raised to 152 exporting slaughterhouses where they were slaughtered, via the 202 exporting and 2,630 importing companies handling that trade, and finally to 151 importing countries. We find stark differences in the subnational origin of the sourcing of different actors and link this supply chain mapping to spatially explicit data on cattle-associated deforestation, to estimate the ‘deforestation risk’ (in hectares/year) of each supply chain actor over time. Our results provide an unprecedented insight into the global trade of a deforestation-risk commodity.