In 2007, JBS bought the Colorado-based Swift & Co. for about $225 million. On that occasion, as Forbes reported, Wesley Batista showed up at Swift headquarters wearing “the basic cowboy gear of jeans, boots and hat. He spoke no English and made a point of getting blood on his hands—showing butchers at his newly acquired Swift how to carve out the most dollars’ worth of cuts from a cow’s carcass.” The brothers did not stop there. Like their father decades before, they gobbled up competitors and grew quickly. By 2021, they supplied about a quarter of all U.S. beef—processing some 22,000 cattle a day—and a fifth of its pork.
Their aggressive expansionism earned the attention of the SEC, which in 2020 issued a cease-and-desist order naming the brothers specifically. The document weaves a tale of transnational corporate conspiracy involving JBS, the Brazilian Development Bank, and “various political parties and candidates in Brazil” who helped facilitate the company’s takeover of Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a meat company founded in Pittsburg, Texas, in 1946. The Batistas were fined $27 million, but the deal closed. “Engaging in bribery to finance their expansion into the U.S. markets and then continuing to engage in bribery while occupying senior board positions at Pilgrim’s reflects a profound failure to exercise good corporate governance,” Charles Cain, chief of the SEC division dedicated to enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, asserted in 2020. As The Hill reported that year, “JBS’s other legal issues include the alleged involvement of Pilgrim’s Pride in a national poultry price fixing scheme. The company agreed Wednesday to pay a $110 million fine to settled charges related to the price fixing allegations in a separate action led by the Justice Department.” Such fines, however, are less than speed bumps for a company with revenues exceeding $50 billion per year.
Now the company is diversifying. Last year, J&F purchased manganese and iron ore mines in central Brazil—the company’s cradle—with the aim of eventually creating a “JBS of mining.” J&F also owns pulpmaker Eldorado Brasil, one of the world’s largest. Eldorado bills itself as “the world’s most modern and sustainable pulp company” and prides itself on its use of clean energy to power its operations as well as the fact that well over 90 percent of its workforce have undergone “anti-bribery training.” Yet the Environmental Paper Network, or EPN, an organization that brings together 150 civil society entities around the goal of sustainable paper production, argues the company can and should be doing more in the context of Brazilian deforestation. “Agriculture and cattle ranching are the notorious drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” Karen Vermeer, the pulp finance coordinator for the EPN, noted in a 2020 report. “But the cattle and soy industry are only one side of the coin, with pulp & paper companies refusing to carry the blame because they do not directly burn the land—other industries do that for them.” Vermeer calls the pulp industry, in which Eldorado is a central player, “a time-bomb which has been growing exponentially” due to “the global consumption of paper having quadrupled over the past 50 years.”