Brazil's Dirty List: How Cattle Ranchers Bypass Forced Labor Safeguards

Sales Surge After Sanctions

Modern slavery is illegal and hidden. In Brazil, workers can be deceived from cities to isolated ranches, where they are forced to work. This makes studying the phenomenon notoriously difficult, explains Tara Mittelberg, a doctoral student at UW-Madison and lead author of a new study on Brazil's meat industry, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. „We cannot directly measure slavery at this scale to see if policies like the Dirty List reduce it,”says Mittelberg. „But we can use a big data approach to estimate how employers using forced labor reacted to sanctions targeting their punishment. We found that they avoided many of the sanctions' consequences, and the cost of this avoidance is relatively low.” Indirect Sales Dilute Sanctions Records showed that while on the Dirty List, ranchers sharply reduced direct sales to slaughterhouses that pledged not to buy from suppliers involved in labor and environmental violations.

However, because the agreements only prohibit direct purchases, listed ranchers redirected cattle sales to other ranchers, many of whom continued to supply the same slaughterhouses. The cost of this redirection is small – a revenue drop of approximately 1% to 14%, according to the study.

Buyers Can Reward Monitoring

Researchers also note that many of these slaughterhouses sold meat and leather products into international supply chains while buying directly or indirectly from Dirty List ranchers. „In current monitoring systems, international supply chains are vulnerable to contamination with modern slavery,”says Mittelberg. „If we truly want to eliminate forced labor from agricultural supply chains, we need traceability that tracks cattle through the entire production system, including ranches that do not sell directly to slaughterhouses.” Looking Beyond the Last Owner Sales data analysis also revealed that when ranchers appear on the Dirty List, they tend to increase sales of animals near slaughter age, but do not change sales of younger animals. Since it takes only two years of good behavior to be removed from the Dirty List, researchers believe it is likely that ranchers keep younger animals in a relatively short wait until they can regain access to the full buyer base.

Two types of changes could help keep Brazil's slavery-linked meat away from foreign meat markets, argues Gibbs. Greater transparency – especially better access to the type of data extracted from cattle health registries – could help buyers trace animals back through the supply chain, beyond just the last owner. „Modern slavery is deliberately hard to see, but better data and better monitoring can make it much harder to hide,”says Gibbs. „We developed a tool called Visipec, in collaboration with partners, to help companies assess indirect suppliers. And efforts in Brazil to establish animal-level traceability could make this self-monitoring even more precise.”Gibbs is also working with other researchers to use satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to map cattle across the Amazon region, opening potential new ways to monitor cattle production, strengthening traceability and building trust in companies' efforts to source cattle responsibly.