Decades of livestock in the Amazon surrendered Roque Quagliato, the “king of cattle”, great wealth – and some problems. The huge farms of his family were accused of submitting workers to slavery -like conditions in the 1990s and to defores large extensions of the tropical forest in the early 2000s.
But as the Brazilian beef sector evolves, pressured by some of the world’s largest export markets, Quagliato, at the age of 85, is now in evidence by something else: he is the face of an effort to fix livestock in the Amazon, one of the world’s largest causes of deforestation.
Quagliato cattle was the first to be identified with ears chips, as part of a state government program to make millions of cattle heads in Pará traceable until January next year – shortly after the state receives world leaders in Belém for the United Nations Climate Summit (UN), COP30, in November.
“What we hope is that, after all this, the international market gives Brazil a better price,” he said, in an interview during a recent cattle auction in Xinguara, one of the capitals of Boi do Pará. The deforesters, he added, are now “chain case”.
Quagliato is keeping an eye on export to more expensive and more demanding markets in the United States, Europe and Asia, some of which buy from other Brazilian states, but not from Pará, at least in part due to animal health concerns and deforestation connections.
“Brazil has been working hard to open high demand markets such as Japan and South Korea, and the improvement of the animal traceability system is one of the most important steps to get into these countries,” said Renan Araújo, senior analyst at S&P Global.
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Pará, which has a herd of 26 million heads, approximately the same size as Australia’s herd, wants to identify all its cattle by 2027, taking advantage of the global spotlight to become a kind of laboratory of a national tracking policy – which would represent a significant transformation for the world’s largest exporter in the world.
So far, the beginning has been nothing auspicious. The law, passed at the end of 2023, requires Pará breeders to identify their cattle by January 2027. However, until May, the state cattle producers had only identified about 12,000 animals individually.
However, the adhesion of major producers, such as Quagliato, dissipated the concerns that “there would be a widespread rejection” of politics, said Andy Jarvis, who directs the program “Future of Food” at Bezos Earth Fund, which donated $ 16.3 million to the Pará project.
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The ambitious initiative, if successful, can be a point of turning in the struggle to stop the destruction of the largest rainforest in the world.
For years environmentalists argue that improvements in cattle traceability would give authorities a powerful tool to prevent animals raised in illegally deforested areas from reaching global supply chains, which depend on Brazil to feed the growing worldwide appetite for beef.
Although the state’s proposal to track the cattle individually is not a silver bullet against deforestation, it would be a breakthrough that many considered unimaginable for a short time.
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Many ranchers are still resisting the program, which, according to them, will take some of them from the market, and few believe that the government will achieve their goals for this year. But several great ranchers interviewed by Reuters are supporting politics.
“There is a cost,” said Quagliato. But when producers sit down to talk about it, he added, they just conclude that “it’s the time, they have to do it now.”
The Quagliato family still faces questions about the liability of their activities in the forest and in the populations that live there.
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Ibama reported that Quagliato paid all his fines for deforestation, except one that was resolved through an agreement to regenerate the forest. One of his family members was recently convicted of submitting workers to working conditions analogous to slavery, although he is using. Quagliato declined to comment on these cases.
“We have political will”
The identification of each ox and cow in Pará is not just a tool to ensure that the animals are not grazing where the forests have been illegally overthrown. More than anything, it allows animal health agencies to quickly trace any sick cattle and their contacts.
The data suggest that the market rewards traceable herds. The average price of beef that Brazil exports is 8% lower than that of Uruguay, which tracks cattle individually, according to data from 2024 compiled by the Brazilian Association of Export Industries (ABIEC).
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This is partly due to the fact that Uruguay sells much of its beef to the European Union, which has long worked to rid their deforestation chains with deforestation, and requires individual traceability at least 90 days before cattle slaughter.
Most of the great ranchers interviewed by Reuters see the individual identification of cattle as an inevitable path, although some fear that Pará is advancing too fast and would like more time to adapt.
Quagliato did not mean the size of his flock or how many of his animals were identified. Local communication vehicles estimated the size of its herd in about 150,000 heads of cattle.
Rooms told Reuters that they are waiting to comply with the law until the legal deadline approaches, because they want to make sure it will not be stretched, as many observers expect. Some also complained of technical failures in the cattle registration system, which the government denies.
Still, the project gained support from both the refrigerators and environmentalists. JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, has donated 300,000 identification earrings for the program so far.
“I’m optimistic,” said Marina Guyot, Public Policy Manager at IMAFLORA, a non -profit organization that has been donated from bezos to help implement policy. “The moment we are, it has political will, and that is more than half of the way.”
“It gets scared”
Alaion Lacerda’s 50 heads of cattle, in the heart of Pará, chews the pasture beside the cocoa that grows under the shadow of the native trees he planted. It is one of the thousands of small producers on the basis of Brazil’s supply chain, providing calves that the largest ranchers get fat and sell to refrigerators.
But, like about half of the cattle in Pará, its herd is grazing in areas where the forest has been illegally overthrown, and he now wonders if the new law will make it harder for him to sell his cattle.
“It gets scared,” he said, sitting on his porch. “We live in a region that almost every producer has passive.”
Every day, satellites collect data on deforestation, which government and refrigerators use to identify farms where forests were illegally overthrown. But the new tracking system will allow authorities to geographically locate cattle with an electronic stick.
Such a tool can make it harder for producers to say that cattle raised in illegally deforested areas came from legal farms, said Ricardo Negrini, a federal prosecutor who monitors the links between deforestation and the supply of beef.
But the program, he explained, “leaves a little to be desired on environmental criterion”, partly because earrings only geolocalize animals at specific times, giving enough time for bad faith producers to move cattle without noticing.
“Whatever you are going to control, you can’t get it all,” said Raul Protázio Romão, Pará’s secretary of environmental and sustainability. “You have to progressively implement control mechanisms that constantly evolve and that are closing gaps.”
Lincoln Bueno, a large rancher and chairman of the Mercury meat exporter, said he is not yet tracking his cattle because he fears being punished for possibly buying small suppliers who illegally deforested installments of their lands.
“I can only do what I can do,” he said.
Convincing producers like Bueno and Lacerda to identify its cattle is Pará’s biggest challenge. This is why the government now allows ranchers whose properties have illegal deforestation to return to the market with a commitment to allow the forest to regenerate.
A recent morning, agricultural analysts from a non -profit organization called Solidadad visited several small producers they expected to enter the program. Some were open to the idea that solving environmental problems would bring benefits. Others, like Lacerda, were more skeptical.
“To make a reforestation, isolate the area, so I can be cool, then I will have to reduce the number of animals,” he said, arguing hypothetically. But that, he added, “will affect my profitability.”
