How Brazil can chart a path to sustainable cattle production

Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef, representing almost 30% of the world’s total beef exports in 2022, according to the Beef Report of the Brazilian Beef Exporters Association (ABIEC). However, livestock production is related to deforestation and represents a major source of methane emissions, creating impacts on climate change.

The challenge of reconciling the country’s contribution to global food security with actions to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss will require transitioning cattle production to a more sustainable model.

Over the past decade, the cattle sector has implemented many commitments and initiatives to make production more sustainable and address illegal practices. These include the cattle agreements between the beef packers and the public prosecutor’s office in Brazil and the development of the Beef On Track protocol.

Voluntary zero-deforestation commitments by major companies have also been made possible through initiatives, such as the Cerrado Protocol, which involves major beef exporters in Brazil voluntarily adopting new criteria for sourcing cattle in the Cerrado biome.

However, the way ahead is not easy. The challenges of disassociating livestock production from deforestation and promoting technology adoptions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions involve a whole system and are interconnected. A new multi-stakeholder approach is critical.

Transforming Brazil’s cattle sector requires alignment across supply chain actors about the main barriers to change and the potential solutions to overcome them.

ABIEC and agribusiness analysts Agroicone are leading an effort to engage the sector to identify priority actions for the cattle transition. Among these are technical assistance, environmental regularization and financing and inclusion of producers.

But first, we need public and private efforts to scale the use of low-carbon technologies that can help boost yields while reducing emissions, including technical assistance networks to support food system actors. Examples of these techniques are pasture recovery through measures such as crop rotation, livestock semi-intensification through selective breeding and improved diets.

These measures could have a major positive impact on productivity and the environment. The World Economic Forum’s recent report on agricultural production in the Cerrado showed that these techniques could increase beef production by 134% per hectare while reducing emissions by 45% in the biome.

Traceability systems, which help identify products linked to deforested land, are paramount to addressing deforestation risk in the cattle supply chain and ensuring stakeholders comply with regulations, such as the Brazil Forest Code and the upcoming European Union (EU) Deforestation Regulation. Yet, it is critical that smallholder farmers in Brazil also have access to these tools and support to achieve compliance and ensure they are not unfairly penalized or excluded from the market.

The Pará Cattle Integrity Programme – a jurisdictional approach to traceability – is an excellent example of a local-level traceability approach. Under the programme, Pará’s 26 million head of cattle will all be mandatorily tagged by 2026, helping move the state towards legal forms of production and creating more transparency, which will boost confidence in cattle production and help attract investment.

While traceability is a priority challenge, solving it will not solve the problems; a whole package of measures is needed for the transition. For example, Mato Grosso’s Produce, Conserve, and Include Strategy, a regional multi-stakeholder approach to commodity production, is a clear example of effective public-private sector collaboration—without which there is no progress.

These jurisdictional-level approaches are complemented by voluntary sector-wide commitments, such as the Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which brings together Brazil’s biggest cattle companies, JBS and Marfrig, working towards collective targets for the sector.

The cost of the sustainable cattle transition will be high, making support from investors, philanthropists and financial institutions crucial to its success.

Initiatives such as Innovative Finance for the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco – the programme of the Tropical Forest Alliance, United Nations Environment Programme and The Nature Conservancy that aims to scale up deforestation-free finance mechanisms in commodity supply chains – will play a vital role in the transition by mobilizing capital to farms and initiatives on the ground.

These initiatives need to be scaled up through a range of emerging public-private mechanisms, such as the Catalytic Capital for the Agricultural Transition.

High-integrity voluntary carbon markets also have a role to play, given their potential to mobilize, at speed and scale, billions of dollars a year of additional climate finance into investments in nature. But they must be genuinely additional to existing science-based decarbonization, driving emissions reductions that would not otherwise happen.

While the financial sector remains hesitant about investing in sustainable livestock given the associated risks, mandatory traceability systems like Pará’s and stronger public-private sector collaboration should significantly de-risk the transition and make it more attractive to investors.

Changing the cattle sector will not be easy. However, Brazil is creating the conditions for a more sustainable cattle sector for current and future generations. It will simply take implementing this multi-stakeholder approach, scaling up landscape and jurisdictional-led initiatives, forging public-private sector collaboration and putting ranchers at the centre of these efforts.

This is not just about a nationwide effort but as the host of the Group of 20 Presidency and UN Climate Conference 2025 (COP30), Brazil has a unique opportunity to position itself as a climate leader on the world stage by implementing this approach and encouraging other producer countries to follow suit.