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Saturday, April 30, 2022

Lawrence: Ron DeSantis Is $1 Billion Stupider Than We Thought

Music Theory and White Supremacy

Wonking Out: Education Has Less to Do With Inequality Than You Think

Paul Krugman

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Wonking Out: Education Has Less to Do With Inequality Than You Think

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“You're reading Paul Krugman's newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  A guide to U.S. politics and the economy — from the mainstream to the wonkish.

Paul Krugman  A guide to U.S. politics and the economy — from the mainstream to the wonkish.

President Biden says that he is taking a “hard look” at student debt relief, which probably means that some significant relief is coming. For one thing, Biden promised relief during the 2020 campaign. For another, it’s one progressive priority he can address by executive action, which is important given the extreme difficulty of getting anything through an evenly divided Senate.

How much relief will he offer? I have no idea. How much relief should he offer? I’m for going as big as political realities allow, but I understand that too generous a debt write-off might produce a backlash. And I have no confidence that I know where the line should be drawn.

What I think I do know is that much of the backlash to proposals for student debt relief is based on a false premise: the belief that Americans who have gone to college are, in general, members of the economic elite.

The falsity of this proposition is obvious for those who were exploited by predatory for-profit institutions that encouraged them to go into debt to get more or less worthless credentials. The same applies to those who took on educational debt but never managed to get a degree — not a small group. In fact, around 40 percent of student loan borrowers never finish their education.

But even among those who make it through, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of economic success. And I’m not sure how widely that reality is understood.

What is widely understood is that America has become a far more unequal society over the past 40 years or so. The nature of rising inequality, however, isn’t as broadly known. I keep encountering seemingly well-informed people who believe that we’re mainly looking at a widening gap between the college-educated and everyone else.

This story had some truth to it in the 1980s and 1990s, although even then it didn’t account for the huge income gains at the top of the distribution — the rise of the 1 percent and even more among the 0.01 percent. Since 2000, however, most college graduates have actually seen their real incomes stagnate or even decline.

The Economic Policy Institute had a very useful analysis of this data just before the pandemic. Between 1979 and 2000, there was a rough match between growth in one measure of overall inequality — the gap between wages at the 95th percentile and those of the median worker — and its estimate of the average wage premium for college-educated workers. Since 2000, however, wage inequality has continued to rise, while the college premium has barely changed:

It’s not about the degrees.
Economic Policy Institute

Furthermore, not all college graduates have had the same experience. Some have done pretty well, but many have seen no gains at all:

Graduating into inequality.
Economic Policy Institute

I have my own version of this observation, comparing growth of incomes of households at the 95th percentile with those of the median male college graduate:

Good times for some, but not the typical male graduate.
Census Bureau

Now, Americans at the 95th percentile don’t consider themselves rich, because they aren’t, surely as compared with C.E.O.s, hedge funders and so on. Nonetheless, they have seen substantial gains. On the other hand, the typical college graduate — who is, remember, someone who made it through and received an accredited degree — hasn’t.

So here’s how I see it: Much of the student debt weighing down millions of Americans can be attributed to false promises.

Some of these promises were scams pure and simple; think Trump University. Even those who weren’t outright cheated, however, were pulled in by elite messaging assuring them that a college degree was a ticket to financial success. Too many didn’t realize that their life circumstances might make it impossible to finish their education — it’s hard for comfortable, upper-middle-class Americans to realize how difficult staying in school can be for young people from poorer families with unstable incomes. Many of those who did manage to finish found that the financial rewards were far smaller than they expected.

And all too many of those who fell victim to these false promises ended up saddled with large debts.

Of course, there are many Americans who have suffered from rising inequality. I wouldn’t argue that college debtors are greater victims than, say, truck drivers who have seen their real wages plunge or families stuck in declining rural areas and small towns. And we should be helping all of these people.

Unfortunately, most things we could and should be doing for Americans in need — like extending the expanded child tax credit — can’t be done in the face of 50 Republican senators, plus Joe Manchin. Student debt relief, by contrast, is something President Biden can do. So he should.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

Friday, April 29, 2022

Why Can’t These Republicans Remember What They Did on January 6th? | The...

Brookwood High players said they hear the n-word at Cherokee game | 11alive.com

Brookwood High players said they hear the n-word at Cherokee game | 11alive.com

How Americans' love of beef is helping destroy the Amazon rainforest - Washington Post

Devouring the rainforest

"Cattle ranching, responsible for the great majority of deforestation in the Amazon, is pushing the forest to the edge of what scientists warn could be a vast and irreversible dieback that claims much of the biome. Despite agreement that change is necessary to avert disaster, despite attempts at reform, despite the resources of Brazil’s federal government and powerful beef companies, the destruction continues.

[How deforestation is pushing the Amazon toward a tipping point]

But the ongoing failure to protect the world’s largest rainforest from rapacious cattle ranching is no longer Brazil’s alone, a Washington Post investigation shows. It is now shared by the United States — and the American consumer.

In the two years since Washington lifted a moratorium that was imposed on Brazilian beef over food safety concerns, the United States has grown to become its second-biggest buyer. The country bought more than 320 million pounds of Brazilian beef last year — and is on pace to purchase nearly twice as much this year. The biggest supplier is the beef behemoth JBS, whose fleet of brands stock some of America’s major retail chains and businesses: Kroger, Goya Foods, Albertsons (the parent company of Safeway, Jewel-Osco and Vons).

JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, has repeatedly been accused by environmentalists of buying cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Greenpeace first alleged such ties in a 2009 report. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental law enforcement agency, Ibama, fined the company what was then more than $7.5 million, alleging that two of its Amazon meatpacking plants had purchased nearly 50,000 such animals. In October, federal prosecutors focusing on deforestation alleged widespread “irregularities” in the company’s direct supply chain from January 2018 to June 2019 in Pará state.

But in a forest where some beef producers still don’t track cattle origins, and in a country where no law specifically prohibits the purchase of cattle from illegally deforested land, JBS considers itself one of the good guys. It says it has prioritized the environment and blocked more than 14,000 cattle ranches that didn’t comply with company standards. It has signed agreements with environmentalists and federal prosecutors promising not to purchase cattle from ranches that were illegally deforested. It publishes the names of the ranches from which it purchases cattle.

None of it has been enough.

By reviewing thousands of shipment and purchase logs, and analyzing satellite imagery of Amazon cattle ranches, The Post found that JBS has yet to disentangle itself from ties to illegal deforestation. The destruction is hidden at the base of a long and multistep supply chain that directly connects illegally deforested ranches — and ranchers accused of environmental infractions — to factories authorized by the U.S. government to export beef to the United States.

Between January 2018 and October 2020, records show, JBS factories with that authorization made at least 1,673 cattle purchases from 114 ranchers who at the time owned at least one property cited for illegal deforestation. Several ranchers from whom JBS bought cattle were notorious — alleged by authorities to be among the Amazon’s most destructive actors. The supply chain, the examination found, was infected with dozens of ranches where land had been deforested illegally. Satellite imagery showed that several of the operations had cattle on land where grazing was prohibited at the time — in what environmental regulators called a violation of Brazilian law.

“Environmental control in the beef supply chain needs to be much more rigorous,” said Suely Araújo, who directed Ibama from 2016 to 2018. “Meatpackers need to stop complaining and actually control their supply networks. We’ve talked about cattle tracking for three decades but have never done it in a real way.”

President Biden has been outspoken about the need to conserve the Amazon, a vital carbon sink that scientists say must be preserved to avert catastrophic warming. But the U.S. agency that authorizes Brazil’s meatpacking plants to export to the United States says it doesn’t try to determine whether the operations cause environmental damage. Seven plants greenlighted by the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service are in the Amazon.

[Climate Solutions: Are my hamburgers hurting the planet?]

Brazil’s Environment Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Agriculture Ministry blamed “historic land-use problems,” not the beef industry, for deforestation.

Senior officials at JBS say Brazil’s cattle supply chain is one of the world’s most complex, involving thousands of ranches spread over expansive territories, and is extremely difficult to monitor. Marcio Nappo, director of corporate sustainability at the beef giant, told The Post that the company has gone beyond what other companies have done to root out deforestation.

“JBS has been in the top five, top 10 companies in eliminating deforestation in its supply chain,” Nappo said. “…We can say with great confidence that we have already advanced enormously.”

The company has moved aggressively to stop purchases from operations that graze cattle on illegally deforested land, he said, using a “pioneering” monitoring system. He said the company plans to root out all deforestation in its supply chain by 2025 and has already succeeded in stopping purchases from ranches that have carried out illegal deforestation.

But the biggest problem in Brazil’s cattle industry today, and a key reason deforestation in the Amazon has reached a 15-year high, isn’t the direct supplier. That hasn’t been the case in years. The biggest problem is the indirect suppliers — ranchers who know how to work the system, shuffling cattle from ranch to ranch to conceal their illegal origins and sell them off.

The game is called “cattle laundering.” The forest is full of players, swaggering ranchers who built their businesses from the embers of the forest. Today, one Amazon cowboy, Zaercio Fagundes Gouveia, says cattlemen like him have a new focus:

“The United States.”

Cattle in a holding pen on a ranch in São Félix do Xingu in Brazil's Pará state.

Cattle in a holding pen on a ranch in São Félix do Xingu in Brazil's Pará state.(Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg News)

The life of an Amazonian steer typically amounts to climbing a ladder. At the bottom rung, where the system is least regulated and where most illegal deforestation occurs, are operations focused on breeding. Then the young animals are moved to properties that nurture them through adolescence. Next up are the fattening farms.

With each rung climbed, the system is more closely monitored and regulated, until the animal reaches the top of the ladder, the processing plant, where it is slaughtered and its meat butchered.

There was a time when nearly every stage of the process involved burning down forest, a cycle of fire and beef that transformed much of the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso — Portuguese for “thick forest” — into a checkerboard of cattle ranches. But a decade ago, leading beef producers signed a pair of agreements to clean up the industry.

One was a 2009 accord with Greenpeace that committed signatories to eliminating deforestation in their entire supply chains. The other was an agreement with federal prosecutors, in Brazil’s last real attempt to take on the powerful sector. Its most important signatory was JBS.

In the agreement, the producers promised to stop sourcing cattle from ranches that continued illegal deforestation. The effort would include stopping all cattle purchases from operations with environmental embargoes — citations that prohibit ranchers from grazing cattle on land that in most cases was illegally deforested.

But rather than cull deforestation from the industry, investigators say, the reforms pushed it further out of sight. Cattle are not tracked individually in Brazil, as they are in neighboring Argentina and in Europe. All that ranchers with embargoed landhave to do is ship their cattle to properties with clean environmental records. Once the animals reach a ranch that doesn’t have a history of deforestation, they are effectively born again — cleansed and ready to be sold to producers such as JBS for slaughter and shipment.

“This is cattle laundering,” said Raoni Rajão, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “The scheme has become institutionalized.”

The Post, in a collaboration with the Dutch environmental research organization Aidenvironment, analyzed thousands of cattle purchase and shipment logs that provide a glimpse into this world. The analysis, which focused on three U.S.-authorized JBS plants located in areas of large-scale deforestation in the Amazon, did not seek to capture all ties to deforestation. It was based on Ibama embargoes, which, according to a 2015 study, cover less than one-fifth of deforested areas.

Level of damage in pasture areas

around JBS meatpacking plants

Meatpacking plants

Indigenous territory

Confresa, Mato Grosso

Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso

The documents nonetheless expose loopholes and failings that investigators say bedevil the wider industry. They reveal what’s on the surface: JBS does direct business with ranchers who have extensive histories of deforestation; 3 percent of the plants’ cattle purchases between January 2018 and October 2020 were from ranchers who had been cited for deforestation by Ibama. They also reveal what’s beneath the surface, leading into the labyrinth of the indirect supply chain, where illegally deforested farms are hidden.

The documents draw a direct line. It begins at cattle ranches accused of illegal deforestation. It leads to ranches with no environmental infractions. It then travels to JBS slaughterhouses certified to export meat to the United States.

At the first step in the process, in the supply chains of two of the three JBS plants, The Post and Aidenvironment identified 71 ranches where Ibama had embargoed a section because of deforestation. (The Post was unable to obtain cattle shipment records for the third plant.)

The analysis found that those properties had shipped at least 7,912 head of cattle to clean ranches that directly supply JBS.

Finally, the examination revealed that those clean ranches made at least 263 sales of an unspecified number of cattle to JBS factories authorized to export to the United States.

Shuffling cattle from dirty ranches to clean ones isn’t against the law: It’s a workaround. What is against the law is using embargoed land to raise cattle — which Ibama inspectors say happens frequently. “The cattle produced there is commercialized normally,” said one Ibama agent in Mato Grosso, who like other government regulators spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely. “The state has lost its function. Society is acting however it wants, regardless of the law.”

At The Post’s request, the geospatial company Maxar Technologies produced satellite imagery of five indirect JBS suppliers with embargoed land. The images showed that three of the ranches had cattle on land that was embargoed at the time.

Luiz Alfredo Abreu, attorney for Nova ranch owner Ricardo Eugênio Palmeira, said state authorities had given the rancher permission to use those areas. “He can sell cattle even to the president of the United States,” Abreu said. “This embargo is nothing.”

Ibama and state officials called that assertion inaccurate. “The embargo remains valid — so much so that the farmer was recently fined for disobeying it,” Ibama said in a statement. Local authorization does not override Ibama embargoes, state and federal officials said.

Palmeira is also a direct supplier to JBS. But his deforestation record is paltry compared with those of some ranchers with whom JBS has done direct business, The Post found.

One was José de Castro Aguiar Filho, who has been assessed more than $11 million in environmental fines. He has been described by the Intercept Brasil as one of the “25 biggest destroyers of the Amazon.” (In audio messages to The Post, the rancher called authorities who fined him “not very correct” and said he barely sells cattle now.)

Another supplier, Mário Quirino da Silveira, was described by the federal government in 2008 as one of the Amazon’s biggest deforesters. (Repeated attempts to contact Quirino da Silveira were unsuccessful.) Another was Vitor Elisio Poltronieri, accused by environmental authorities in 2009 of being one of Mato Grosso’s biggest deforesters. (Poltronieri didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Two more direct suppliers, Aldo Pedreschi and his son Aldo Pedreschi Filho, both named two of Mato Grosso’s biggest deforesters, have been cumulatively assessed more than $3.6 million in environmental fines. (Pedreschi died in 2020. Efforts to contact his son were not successful. A former family lawyer denied wrongdoing: “The family never committed any environmental crime!”)

Presented with The Post’s findings on its supply chain, including the names of the particularly notorious suppliers, JBS said it had severed ties with the men. The company acknowledged that its deforestation monitoring system targets ranches, not their owners, though many operate multiple properties — some sanctioned and some not — and can shuffle cattle between them.

Once the animals arrive at the JBS plants, the process leading to export to the United States can begin. Shipment records provided by Panjiva, the trade research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, show that JBS exports almost all of its U.S.-bound beef to its own American facilities.

But neither the U.S. government nor the American consumer knows where it goes from there. Once imported beef passes inspection, it can be stripped of all labels that identify it as foreign-sourced and be sold as if it were produced domestically. No federal agency tracks the domestic sale of imported beef. And retailers aren’t obligated to inform consumers of the raw beef’s country of origin. That labeling requirement was repealed with the passage of the 2016 omnibus spending bill.

To try to locate the beef, The Post asked 16 national grocery and restaurant chains whether they sell JBS beef from Brazil. Only Kroger and Albertsons said they did — but a very small amount. Goya Foods has imported nearly 2 million pounds of canned Brazilian beef since March 2020, trade records show. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Kroger said it has a “no-deforestation commitment” and has “engaged the JBS team to further review the situation.”

JBS, citing “commercial restrictions,” declined to divulge its list of U.S. buyers. It did not respond to questions about whether it informs American retailers of the meat’s country of origin.

The beef of the Amazonian steer has finally reached the top rung of the ladder: the American consumer. But many of those buyers will have little idea it is Brazilian.

Cattle graze on land recently burned and deforested by ranchers near Novo Progresso in Pará state in August 2020.

Cattle graze on land recently burned and deforested by ranchers near Novo Progresso in Pará state in August 2020. (Andre Penner/AP)

‘A land without men for men without land’

How cattle, the most common of animals, became central to the decimation of the world’s most valuable forest is a story of intention, not coincidence. It begins in the mid-1960s, when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship. Worried that vast stretches of uncontrolled territory in the Amazon would invite foreign invasions, generals set out to conquer what had until then been unconquerable.

The mission: “Operation Amazon.” The rallying call: “A land without men for men without land.”

The tool of conquest: cattle.

The bovine was seen as a crucial ally in taming — and then claiming — the wildest of terrain. A relatively small number of the animals can range across large expanses of land. Their grazing keeps the jungle from regenerating. And their meat provides both sustenance and income.

“The idea was conquest, to conquer and integrate the interior into the rest of the country,” said Antoine Acker, a historian of the Amazon at the University of Zurich. “The cow was a powerful animal for that. It occupies a lot of land and is really cheap.”

With investment benefits, tax breaks and a new web of highways, Brazil persuaded local and foreign investors alike to bet on the seemingly paradoxical endeavor of cattle ranching in the rainforest. The goal of the dictatorship was to have at least 20 million head of cattle in the Amazon within a few decades. Brazil transitioned to democracy in 1985, but exceeded that benchmark for raising cattle by 1990 and has since more than quadrupled it.

People rich and poor rushed into the Amazon, burned chunks of forest, put down cattle and claimed the land by means both legal and illegal. In a vast region largely beyond government control, slave labor was pervasive, violent land disputes erupted and Indigenous communities were massacred. By the early 2000s, farmers were burning enough forest each year to cover New Jersey.

Lawmakers tried to curtail the destruction. Under the forest code, farmers and companies were limited to burning only 20 percent of their properties. Knocking down more — or razing public and Indigenous lands — would make the deforestation illegal. But what was said in faraway Brasília was one thing. What happened in the Amazon was another.

Ranchers continued to burn forest to widen their pastures. Land grabbers and squatters invaded and burned land to steal it. Environmental authorities struggled to patrol the vast territory: One of their primary law enforcement tools was the embargo. But the comparatively few citations that were issued had little effect. Few environmental fines are paid. Others are contested in the byzantine Brazilian appellate system in cases that drag on for years. The slaughterhouses had little incentive to stop buying cattle that came from illegally deforested land. And the ranchers had little incentive to stop selling it.

Incentive was exactly what federal prosecutor Daniel Azeredo hoped to provide. A native of southeastern Brazil — a wealthier, largely urban region where the Amazon feels as distant as a foreign country — he arrived in Pará state in 2007 and quickly realized conditions were unsustainable. Pressuring ranchers to stop burning forest wasn’t working. His office was inundated with cases against them — all dead ends. He needed to exert pressure another way.

He assembled a list of ranches with embargoes to determine which meatpackers bought their cattle. Then he followed which grocery stores bought that meat. Then he started suing. He threatened Brazil’s largest grocery stores, alleging that they hadn’t ensured their meat was free of ties to deforestation. The fallout was immediate: Several grocery stores started to boycott the slaughterhouses linked to the destruction.

“It was decisive,” said Beto Veríssimo, co-founder of the Amazon Institute of People and Environment. “It had impact.”

In 2009, the largest slaughterhouses signed an agreement with Azeredo’s office declaring that they would no longer source cattle from ranches that were being deforested illegally or had been cited with an embargo. The reforms contributed to one of the century’s great environmental success stories. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon plummeted.

But even then, Azeredo couldn’t shake the feeling that the gains wouldn’t last. There were gaps in the reforms. It wouldn’t be long before ranchers found them.

A JBS facility in Tucumã in Pará state, seen in October.

A JBS facility in Tucumã in Pará state, seen in October. (Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg News)

The São Judas Tadeu ranch sits at the cusp of the Amazon rainforest like a giant anchor, more than half the size of Manhattan. It has smoldered and burned for years. Thirty-six fires raged through the property in 2005 alone. An additional 13 in 2008. And seven more in 2013. In all, according to a fire analysis by University of Maryland geographer Louis Giglio, more than 100 fires have scorched the ranch since 2004.

Only one-fourth of the ranch still has remnants of native vegetation, property records show. Its history of fires suggests “forest clearing,” said Giglio, who studies global fire emissions. Embargoes have been issued for sections of the ranch, but satellite imagery produced by Maxar showed cattle on a swath where they were prohibited at the time.

São Judas Tadeu ranch

The ranch is also an indirect supplier to a JBS plant authorized to export beef to the United States.

From January 2018 to January 2019, government cattle shipment records show, the São Judas Tadeu ranch transferred at least 3,173 head of cattle to the nearby, embargo-free São Sebastian ranch. In the months after the transfers, the clean ranch made at least 24 cattle sales to a JBS plant in northeastern Mato Grosso. The records show that both properties are owned by a single rancher.

Zaercio Fagundes Gouveia — short-cropped hair, gold bracelet, big aviators — is from the southeastern city of Ituiutaba. He arrived in Mato Grosso three decades ago, when his father joined the beef rush to become an Amazonian rancher. They knocked down a section of the forest — “permitted and cleanly legal at that time,” the son said — put down some cattle and built a ranch. Gouveia, then 19, never moved back home.

The region was forest and little else then — a blanket of green that would have been an environmentalist’s Eden. But to Gouveia, “it was awful, just terrible.” The closest telephone was more than 150 miles away on a dirt highway. There were few paved roads. Schools were out of the question. His daughter was home-schooled. To build what he has — an agribusiness with six ranches and 200 employees — and to help bring an economy to a region largely without one took sacrifice. More, he said, than most ranchers could handle.

And now: “It’s wonderful.”

Much of the forest is gone. The terrain is latticed with a network of roads and dotted with cattle ranches, churches, towns — all powered by beef. The region developed and prospered, he said, by the grace of settlers like him and a market poised to continue its growth.

Current locations of

JBS meatpacking plants

Global beef consumption, a traditional marker of development, is projected to continue to rise over the next decade. The United States is the largest market: It is home to 4 percent of the world’s population but eats about 20 percent of its beef.

Gouveia said he’s here to provide it. There’s just one obstacle in his way.

“The environmentalists,” he said. “I have so many environmental problems. So many. It’s not easy.”

Authorities have cited Gouveia eight times since 2008 for environmental infractions. At the time of his sales to JBS, he stood accused of knocking down at least 5.4 square miles of forest and had been assessed nearly $3 million, a sum researchers say puts him among the most-fined ranchers in the Amazon.

Gouveia blames the infractions on fires started by others and on environmental regulators who were incompetent and inexperienced. He denies wrongdoing. One large embargo was recently dismissed, and he is appealing at least one fine. The accusations, he said, once wouldn’t have impacted his supply chain much. Ranchers could continue sending cattle directly to the meat plants. But with this “extremely serious and unjust environmental pressure on top of us,” he said, ranchers had to find a workaround.

“A different system,” he called it.

Gouveia continued to raise cattle at São Judas Tadeu — but not, he said, within prohibited areas, which had accounted for more than one-third of the ranch. From São Judas Tadeu, he said, he would ship the cattle to another of his operations to fatten them. Then they’d be sold off to slaughter.

When told The Post had obtained satellite imagery that showed cattle on land embargoed as of May 2021, he shrugged.

“Well, generally, I tell them not to put cows there,” Gouveia said.

JBS cut ties with Gouveia’s Amazonian ranches after it was informed of The Post’s findings — a decision Gouveia bitterly mourned. “You hurt me with this report,” he said. “I talked to you with an open heart.”

He still had reason to be optimistic. The agricultural industry, which managed to grow during the coronavirus pandemic, now accounts for 8 percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product. The lifting of the U.S. moratorium on Brazilian beef two years ago has opened up a massive new market. And President Jair Bolsonaro is in power.

“We’re now the most important industry in Brazil, aren’t we?” Gouveia said.

A boat carrying trucks loaded with cattle passes through the meeting point of the Xingu and Fresco rivers in São Félix do Xingu.

A boat carrying trucks loaded with cattle passes through the meeting point of the Xingu and Fresco rivers in São Félix do Xingu. (Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg News)

The problem is not without a solution. The maze of the cattle supply-chain system has a key. But Brazil has failed to seize it.

Every time cattle are moved in the country, a shipment log called a “Guide of Animal Transport” is created. The purpose of the document is sanitary: to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases and ensure proper cattle vaccinations. But those records, current and former government officials say, can be used to create a cattle-tracking tool and illuminate even the murkiest sections of the supply chain.

Researchers have done it. But not the federal government.

“Does Brazil have the capacity to do this? It does,” said Izabella Mônica Vieira Teixeira, Brazil’s environment minister from 2010 to 2016. “What it lacks is the political will.”

In late 2018, environmental regulators, supermarket chains and beef producers gathered in Brasília to develop a system that would incorporate the cattle shipment logs into a tracking tool. Then Bolsonaro, who’d spent the presidential campaign criticizing environmental regulations, was sworn in. Participants in the discussions say the effort soon fizzled.

“We had the money,” said a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “But people believed there was no way to continue. Things had changed politically.”

The government has since made tracking cattle more difficult. In mid-2019, months into Bolsonaro’s tenure, federal and some state governments sharply restricted access to the records. Documents that were once available to download on Agriculture Ministry websites — albeit painstakingly, one by one — are now even harder to obtain. Even meat producers complain, not without reason, that they’re criticized for not tracking cattle when the government has deprived them of the tools to do it.

“The federal government doesn’t make this data available to third parties,” Brazil’s Agriculture Ministry told The Post in a statement, because it includes confidential information. “It’s essential for the maintenance of the animal health system. Therefore, there is no reason for it to be released for demands that don’t involve the health of animals.”

In that restriction, environmentalists see the contours of what has become a political Rubik’s Cube. Bolsonaro, under international pressure to save the Amazon, has committed to ending illegal deforestation by 2030 and making Brazil carbon-neutral by 2050. But few think those goals can be reached without curbing rapacious cattle ranching. And even fewer think Bolsonaro, who sees those who practice it as a crucial base of support, will do it.

“Brazil is a green power,” Bolsonaro declared during November’s international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. “We are part of the solution. Not the problem.”

Days later, the federal agency charged with monitoring deforestation released its annual report. Deforestation had reached a 15-year high. The Amazon’s losses for the year could nearly cover the state of Connecticut.

A few weeks after that, one more report was released, this one by the national association of Brazilian meat producers. The year 2021 was another banner one for beef. Brazil, which shipped out over 2 million tons, was once again dominant in the global export market: the reigning king of beef.

Heloísa Traiano, Gabriela Sá Pessoa and Reinaldo Chaves contributed to this report.

About this story

Editing by Matthew Hay Brown. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson and Martha Murdock. Graphics by Júlia Ledur. Graphics editing by Kate Rabinowitz. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Alexa Juliana Ard. Design and development by Allison Mann. Design editing by Matt Callahan. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya and Jay Wang.

Sources: Data on deforestation (from 1988 through 2020), forests and water bodies, Indigenous territories and official Amazon borders are from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Pasture areas and levels of damage, as well as the location of meatpacking plants, are from the Atlas das Pastagens, a digital atlas of Brazilian pastures. Pasture areas are as of 2019. Biomass data is from NASA’s ORNL DAAC at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Data on the number of cattle in the Amazon is from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Municipal Livestock Survey. Satellite images are from Maxar Technologies.

Methodology

Cattle purchase and shipment logs

The Post identified three JBS slaughterhouses located in what Brazil defines as the Legal Amazon — a region of nine states that fall within the Amazon basin — that are authorized to export to the United States. The Post obtained the purchase logs of the processing plants through the beef producer’s traceability database, which included identifying information for ranchers who sold to the company. The Post then referenced the names against an Ibama database of federal embargoes. In collaboration with Aidenvironment, an analysis of the indirect supply chain of two of the slaughterhouses was carried out using Guide of Animal Transport (GTA) cattle shipment records in Mato Grosso state. Those records were also referenced against an Ibama database of federal embargoes.

Pasture-quality data

Developed by the Image Processing and Geoprocessing Laboratory of the Federal University of Goiás (Lapig/UFG), the Atlas das Pastagens maps pasture areas in Brazil and their quality. Researchers developed a machine-learning model to analyze nearly 300,000 satellite images from Landsat 5 and Landsat 8. They detected, quantified and classified damage in pasture areas in Brazil from 2010 to 2018. They also conducted field research on pasture areas to create an archive of samples that helped refine the data collected by the two satellites.

Degradation is quantified using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, in which a value of 1.0 correlates with dense, live, green vegetation. Values between 0.4 and 0.6 correlate with moderate damage; values of 0.4 below correlate with severe damage. The accuracy rate of the model is 92 percent."

How Americans' love of beef is helping destroy the Amazon rainforest - Washington Post

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Opinion | Harvard profited from slavery. So did many other institutions. They all need to make amends. - The Washington Post

Opinion Harvard’s history with slavery reveals an ugly truth about America

A headstone marks the grave of Cicely, a 15-year-old Negro "servant" of the Rev. William Brattle, a treasurer at Harvard College, at the Old Burying Ground just outside Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass., on April 27. (Charles Krupa/AP)

"The French novelist Honoré de Balzac was right: “The secret of great fortunes with no obvious source is a crime, forgotten because it was well executed.” In the United States, Southern plantation slavery has dominated historical memory.

But Harvard University’s 134-page report on how slavery benefited the nation’s oldest, richest and most prestigious institution of higher learning bluntly illustrates a crime many Americans prefer to ignore: The whole nation, not just the South, grew rich and powerful from the unpaid labor of enslaved African Americans.

Between Harvard’s founding in 1636 and the outlawing of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783, “Harvard faculty, staff, and leaders enslaved more than 70 individuals,” the report says. But that is only the beginning.

More important is the fact that many major donors — whose gifts “helped the University build a national reputation, hire faculty, support students, grow its collections, expand its physical footprint, and develop its infrastructure” — made their money from the profits of slavery.

Let me quote one key passage from the report, released this week, at length:

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“These financial ties include donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and the American South; from the sale of supplies to such plantations and trade in goods they produced; and from the textile manufacturing industry in the North, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage in the American South. During the first half of the 19th century, more than a third of the money donated or promised to Harvard by private individuals came from just five men who made their fortunes from slavery and slave-produced commodities.”

The crucial acknowledgment that Harvard makes is that this slavery-derived wealth compounded over the decades and centuries, much as money in an interest-bearing bank account grows in a steepening curve over time. The same thing happened on a far grander scale to the wealth that the nation as a whole realized from the coerced, uncompensated labor of enslaved Black men, women and children.

Guest Opinion: Here is a hard historical truth: Slavery powerfully shaped Harvard

The bounty that industrial-scale agricultural slavery produced in the South benefited the North as well. Some of the biggest slave traders were based in Rhode Island. The cotton grown in Alabama and Mississippi supplied the mills of Massachusetts. Financing slavery-based agriculture and trading in its products were so profitable for Wall Street that the powerful mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, lobbied — unsuccessfully — for the city to remain neutral during the Civil War and continue doing business with the South.

Universities have taken the lead, among U.S. institutions, in admitting the ways in which they benefited from slavery and are beginning to redress some of the grievous harm they caused. Universities Studying Slavery, a consortium of 94 schools founded by and based at the University of Virginia, meets twice yearly to further efforts at scholarship and atonement.

One of the most egregious episodes in the sordid history of financing higher education through slavery happened at Georgetown University, one of the premier Catholic universities in the nation. In 1838, with the university facing financial ruin, the Jesuits who ran the school sold 272 enslaved Black people to plantations in Louisiana, where living and working conditions for the enslaved were as harsh as anywhere in the country. The money from that sale kept Georgetown afloat. Like most U.S. colleges, Georgetown discriminated against African Americans in admissions and hiring well into the 20th century.

“Slavery’s legacies persist in racial disparities in education, health, employment, income, wealth and the criminal justice system,” Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow and Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin wrote this week in The Post. “The question before us now is how best to reckon with these realities and atone for our past. Acknowledging the truth is not enough. We have a moral obligation to take action.”

The authors pledged that Harvard will spend $100 million to marshal “Harvard’s intellectual, reputational and financial resources ... to address the harms of the university’s ties to slavery,” with most of the money apparently earmarked for research and education.

The Georgetown revelations prompted even more concrete action: The Jesuit order has promised to raise a $100 million fund administered in partnership with the descendants of the 272 enslaved workers Georgetown sold. Some of that money will fund other organizations, but it will also support both education and elder care for the posterity of Georgetown’s former slaves.

Acknowledgment, research and scholarships are a start. And Bacow and Brown-Nagin may be right that “we can never fully remedy the incalculable damage caused by America’s ‘original sin.’ ” But they and their peers could try a lot harder. Most deserving Black students, after all, cannot identify an ancestor who was enslaved by a well-endowed major university.

The whole nation stole centuries of labor and wealth from African Americans. Any real recompense requires the nation as a whole to come to terms with this monstrous crime."

Opinion | Harvard profited from slavery. So did many other institutions. They all need to make amends. - The Washington Post