Marcel Gomes

Marcel Gomes coordinated a complex, international campaign that directly linked beef from JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, to illegal deforestation in Brazil’s most threatened ecosystems. Armed with detailed evidence from his breakthrough investigative report, Marcel and Repórter Brasil worked with partners to pressure global retailers to stop selling the illegally sourced meat, leading six major European supermarket chains in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom to indefinitely halt the sale of JBS products in December 2021.

A Beef Giant

Brazil is home to some of the world’s most important ecosystems, supporting global biodiversity and climate resilience. The country contains the largest rainforest—the Amazon, which absorbs 25% of CO2 sequestered by all land and contains one in ten known species; the most biodiverse savanna—the Cerrado, whose root systems form an “upside down forest” with 70% of biomass underground; and the largest tropical wetland—the Pantanal, which contains 3% of the world’s wetlands and stores vast amounts of carbon.

Due to rampant deforestation, these critical ecosystems may have already reached a tipping point, diminishing their ability to serve as globally significant carbon sinks. As of today, approximately 19% of the Brazilian Amazon and 50% of its Cerrado have been cleared. Since 2016, the Brazilian Amazon has been found to be a net emitter of carbon dioxide, and droughts in the Pantanal and Cerrado have been linked to reduced moisture from the fragmented Amazon.

Brazil’s beef export industry is the largest in the world—accounting for 20% of global exports—and cattle ranching is the single largest driver of deforestation (responsible for 90% of the loss in Amazon and 70% in the Cerrado). The country has 215 million cows, 69% of which are raised within the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. Because of “cattle laundering,” the supply chain for beef is notoriously difficult to track. Forests are illegally cleared and burned, cattle are brought in to graze, and then sold to farms with no record of illegal deforestation prior to the slaughter.

The Brazilian company JBS is the world’s largest meat processing company, with revenue of roughly US$78 billion in 2022. The company, which slaughters some 35,000 cattle per day in Brazil, sells to more than 150 countries and accounts for 1/3 of Brazilian beef exports.

A Committed Truthteller

Marcel Gomes, 45, is the executive secretary at Repórter Brasil—a nonprofit media outlet working at the intersection of supply chains, human rights, slave labor, and environmental issues—where he leads the investigations and research teams. Marcel seeks to promote a more just society through journalism, which he considers a form of activism. He not only reports on environmental and human rights violations, but also mobilizes economic and political actors to solve problems in Brazilian society. 

Tackling a Global Supply Chain

In 2008, Marcel began building out Repórter Brasil’s investigative team, using a grassroots network of Indigenous communities, local NGOs, and agricultural labor unions to develop a supply chain tracking system for industrial agriculture. As cattle ranching became the largest driver of deforestation in Brazil, his team started to focus on the beef supply chain. Their work came to be recognized by international NGOs as one of the most sophisticated tracking systems of cattle and deforestation in the country. 

In 2020, global NGO Mighty Earth contacted Marcel while conducting research for a campaign about Brazilian beef supplied to European supermarkets. After he laid out a detailed plan on how to expose links between JBS beef and deforestation, Mighty Earth and Repórter Brasil partnered in order to investigate.

Marcel coordinated both the European and Brazilian side of the product tracing for the next six months. He put together a team of freelance researchers in four European countries whose job was to visit various supermarkets and find specific meat products sourced by JBS, such as canned beef or Jack Link’s beef jerky. The researchers would then send a picture of the beef product’s standard export tracking number from Brazil. Marcel’s team meticulously tracked every step, date of visit, supermarket address, and product location.

Once Marcel and his team had access to the tracking number, they traced the beef backwards along the supply chain from meatpacking plant to slaughterhouse and eventually to the farm where the cattle were raised. If the identified farm had been previously sanctioned for deforestation, then his team worked with rural workers to corroborate the data and obtain more information. Once farms were identified, Marcel then shared the locations with the Mighty Earth satellite mapping team, which overlaid images taken each year to measure deforestation in the vicinity of each farm.

In mid-2021, armed with the evidence, Marcel contacted the slaughterhouses and suppliers implicated in the investigation while Mighty Earth communicated directly with the supermarkets. The supermarkets did not dispute the facts unearthed in Repórter Brasil’s investigation and, facing a potential public backlash, agreed to announce boycotts in conjunction with the report’s publication. Meanwhile, Marcel worked with a legal team to prepare for pushback from JBS in advance of the publication. Despite receiving warnings from JBS executives to not publish the reports, he did not back down.

On December 15, 2021, six major European supermarkets chains representing more than US$30 billion in retail sales in four countries (Sainsbury’s in the United Kingdom, Albert Heijn and Lidl in the Netherlands, Carrefour and Delhaize in Belgium, and Auchan in France) committed to stop selling JBS beef products and, in some cases, all beef products sourced from Brazil. They made their announcements upon publication of Marcel’s exhaustive investigation demonstrating that JBS meat products were sourced from farms responsible for deforestation in the threatened ecosystems of the Brazilian Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal.

Marcel and his team specialized in a unique combination of investigative journalism and grassroots outreach to expose environmental crimes and create positive change. Since the publication of the report, there has been increased pressure for further action. In 2022, German retail company Metro Germany, with over US$20 billion in annual sales, dropped all JBS meat products until further notice. A separate 2022 investigation into cattle laundering, coordinated by Marcel, led JBS to publicly admit that it had purchased almost 9,000 cattle raised on illegally deforested lands from 2018-2022. Despite the investigations, JBS claims that it is on track to eliminate illegal deforestation from its cattle supply chain by 2025 in the Amazon, and 2030 in all other Brazilian ecosystems.