This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Brazil's "Dirty List," a public registry that names employers found to have violated anti-slavery laws, is a key component of the country's efforts to combat forced labor. Major meatpackers in Brazil signed sustainable sourcing commitments promising to not purchase cattle directly from ranchers on the Dirty List.
But new research shows that ranchers have found ways around these restrictions, rerouting cattle through intermediaries and allowing cattle linked to forced labor to remain in domestic and international beef and leather supply chains. Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter, and its cattle sector is also one of the country's biggest perpetrators of slave labor. Public pressure helped push a group of companies, including the three largest meatpackers in the Amazon, to sign binding agreements not to buy cattle directly from ranchers who have been added to Brazil's Dirty List.
"In many ways, Brazil leads the world in tackling this problem," says Holly Gibbs, a UW–Madison professor of environmental studies who has studied Brazil's cattle supply chain for more than 15 years. "Having a public list that companies can use to avoid doing business with offenders is remarkable. But we've found the effects on ranchers' overall business outcomes are limited, because the cattle didn't disappear from the supply chain.
They just changed hands." Modern slavery is illegal and hidden. In Brazil, workers may be lured from cities to very remote ranches where they can be pressed into forced labor. That makes it notoriously difficult to study, according to Tara Mittelberg, a UW–Madison graduate student and lead author of a new study of Brazil's beef industry, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We can't directly measure slavery at this scale to see if policies like the Dirty List are reducing it," Mittelberg says. "But we can take a big-data approach to estimate how employers who used forced labor responded to sanctions that aim to punish them. We find that they evade many of the consequences of sanctions, and the costs of this evasion are relatively low." Researchers from Gibbs' lab and a collaborator at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tracked cattle sales using data on tens of millions of cattle transactions in the Brazilian Amazon.
"This kind of detailed transaction data gave us an unusual opportunity," says Gibbs, professor at UW–Madison and director of the Global Land Use and Environment Lab. "Instead of simply asking whether companies stopped buying directly from ranchers on the Dirty List, we could track sales by those ranchers to understand how the cattle linked to forced labor moved through the supply chain." The records revealed that while on the Dirty List, ranchers sharply reduced their direct sales to slaughterhouses that have commitments to avoid suppliers implicated in labor and environmental violations. However, because the agreements only prohibit direct purchases from ranchers on the Dirty List, the listed ranchers shifted cattle sales to other ranchers, many of whom went on to supply the same slaughterhouses.
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