Our thinking

Cow laundering in the Amazon

25 April, 2025

You’ve heard of money laundering. Now meet its rural cousin: cow laundering – where cows jump not over the moon, but over regulations. Cattle farming is now the main cause of deforestation in the Amazon forest, as pastoral fields are being expanded into areas previously covered by natural vegetation. With the biome reaching a tipping point, international pressure puts farmers in the spotlight. While many companies put considerable effort into building deforestation free supply chains, some are taking advantage of its complexity to keep doing business in the shadows. 

The problem is mostly concentrated in the early years of the cows’ lives, as many are bred and raised on illegal farms. To hide their true origins, some farmers mix groups of cows from different places and move them around several establishments. With regulation only demanding clarity on the immediate origin of the whole herd, individual cows go unnoticed. When they finally reach fattening centers, undercover cows are completely blended in with the group and receive the same legitimate certification as their peers. So, when they are finally slaughtered and packed, their meat is purchased in the international market as deforestation-free. 

Can policy be enough of a tool to fix those loopholes? As of now, no. There is no federal law governing meat tracking in Brazil, although one is in the works. These types of initiatives, however, in many cases are challenged by the difficulty of gathering information on the earliest steps of the supply chain. Consequently, even though companies do manage to reach their targets and meet international standards, they might be unwittingly being supplied by illegal farms. Technological solutions as blockchains are perceived as the best alternative, but they are still far from becoming reality and could be too costly for national scale implementation.  

So maybe the real puzzle is not how many cows you can fit in a washing machine (as the old joke goes), but how to take them out of it. 

By Cecilia Pessoa