Chapter 02 · Nature, land & waterCoffee, Cocoa & Agricultural Commodities
Cattle agreements
Definition
Agreements between Brazilian slaughterhouses and regulators or civil society restricting cattle purchases from deforested properties. The two pillars: the federal public prosecutors' Terms of Adjustment of Conduct (TACs), legally binding commitments excluding suppliers linked to illegal deforestation, slave labour or embargoed areas; and the G4 voluntary commitment (2009) by the four largest meatpackers — JBS, Marfrig, Minerva, Bertin — to avoid all post-2009 deforestation, legal or not.
References
Supports definition and framing.
Supports definition and framing.
Overview
What it means
Signed in 2009 after Greenpeace's "Slaughtering the Amazon" campaign, the agreements made Brazil's cattle sector the testbed for commodity zero-deforestation governance. Monitoring systems (satellite-based property mapping against CAR rural registries) now audit direct suppliers with high coverage, and by 2023 roughly 70% of Brazilian beef exports sat under some zero-deforestation commitment.
The structural weakness is the indirect-supplier gap: cattle are laundered through intermediate ranches before reaching compliant final suppliers, undermining both TAC and G4 integrity — the focus of EU deforestation-regulation alignment work and full-traceability pilots.
How it is used
Meatpackers run geospatial supplier-screening systems; prosecutors audit TAC compliance; buyers and financiers condition contracts on agreement adherence; the model informs cocoa, soy and leather traceability frameworks.
Why it matters
Cattle agreements demonstrated that market-based instruments can police deforestation at continental scale — and their indirect-supplier loophole now defines the frontier of supply-chain due diligence.