JBS, the Brazilian meat giant to benefit from the treaty between Europe and Mercosur

Compiled 11 January, updated 11 September 2025

The Mercosur agreement was signed at the end of 2024 and many wondered: who would benefit from this agreement?

Certainly one of the world’s largest and most ‘talked-about’ food producers, Brazil’s JBS, which also owns companies and holdings in Italy.

And, as a starting point, we propose this article from Le Monde.

JBS, the Brazilian meat giant that will benefit from the treaty between Europe and Mercosur

The multinational, the world’s leading producer of animal proteins, is expected to take advantage of the EU-Mercosur treaty to increase its presence in the Old Continent, which accounted for 7% of its exports in 2024.

By Anne-Dominique Correa (Rio de Janeiro, correspondence)

While the announcement on 6 December of the conclusion of the agreement between Mercosur and the European Union agitates the French countryside, in Brazil it is JBS that is popping champagne. The Brazilian multinational, the world’s leading producer of animal proteins, is expected to take advantage of the treaty to increase its presence in the Old Continent, which accounted for around 7% of its exports in 2024.

Below: JBS is the world’s third largest food producer.

The agreement allows Mercosur countries to export an additional 99,000 tonnes of beef at a tariff reduced to 7.5 per cent. “JBS produces most of Brazil’s high-end meat, which is the most valued in Europe,” analyses Alessandro Francisco Trindade de Oliveira, of the Federal Institute of Parana, for whom Brazil “could at least double its meat exports to the European Union. .

Enough to support the 364 billion reais (57.48 billion euros) turnover group, which weighs in at 13.3 billion euros on the stock exchange. According to a study by the Economic Research Institute published in August 2023, its activities account for 2.1% of the country’s gross domestic product and generate 2.73% of jobs.

The trade union chaired by Ettore Prandini speaks of ‘zero duty’ while Le Monde certifies that it is 7.5%.

Massive deforestation

This is a far cry from the modest family butcher’s shop founded in 1953 by brothers José Batista Sobrinho and Juvencio Batista, two farmers from Neropolis, in the state of Goias, in the centre-west of the country. Today, the company slaughters 75,000 cattle, 14 million poultry and 147,000 pigs per day. It has more than 10 fattening units in Brazil, with a capacity of 2 million cattle.

In Brazil, the expansion of the agricultural sector was strongly encouraged during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), which wanted to increase the number of cattle farms in the west and north of the country, in particular to ‘occupy’ the Amazon and remove it from the lust of foreign powers, at the cost of massive deforestation. But it is since the 2000s that JBS, then led by Joesley and Wesley Batista, sons of José Batista Sobrinho, has experienced international growth. The group benefits from the support of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) as part of the industrial policy of the governments of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), which sought to promote ‘national champions’ .

BNDES entered the company and contributed 8 billion reais in exchange for control of 20% of the shares. This windfall allowed the group to accelerate its international expansion before an IPO in São Paulo in 2007. The group now accounts for 25 per cent of the world beef and offal market and operates in 17 countries. And it does not intend to stop there: management announced on 21 November an investment of USD 2.5 billion (EUR 2.38 billion) over five years in Nigeria to build six processing plants for poultry, beef and pork.

Several scandals

In Brazil, the company has been the subject of several scandals. In 2017, the brothers Joesley and Wesley confessed to having paid 400 million reais in bribes to politicians. Two months earlier, its image had already been tarnished by another case: the company was targeted by a federal police investigation into a bribery scheme that allegedly allowed bad meat to enter the market, leading the European Union to suspend imports by the companies involved.

While, in an email to Le Monde , JBS defended itself by stating that at the time ‘none of its units were closed’ the affair has left its mark. On Wednesday 20 November, Carrefour decided to suspend the sale of meat from Mercosur countries, citing the risk of ‘lower environmental and health requirements’ before changing its mind.

For Allan de Campos, a specialist in the impact of the agri-food sector on public health at São Paulo State University, the Europeans are right to be cautious. In Brazil, cattle ‘are fed on maize and soya that contain high amounts of pesticides, such as glyphosate, and are subjected to antibiotic treatments,’ he recalls. Moreover, it ensures that multinationals only check cattle when they are on finishing farms, the last stage of breeding before slaughter, thus ignoring the sanitary conditions on the other farms where the animals are born and fattened.

Lack of control

This lack of control also raises doubts about the ability of multinationals to curb deforestation. Almost half of Brazil’s livestock, reaching a record 238.6 million head in 2023, is concentrated in the Amazon region, where extensive livestock farming is the main driver of deforestation: between 1985 and 2022, 77% of deforested land was thus converted to pasture, according to the MapBiomas collective.

According to the e-mail sent to Le Monde , the company ‘prohibits purchases from properties that deforest illegally’ and ‘evaluates thousands of potential cattle operations every day using a satellite monitoring system’. But, due to the lack of control over its indirect suppliers, JBS remains “one of the main drivers of deforestation” in Brazil, worries Boris Patentreger, French director of the NGO Mighty Earth, who calculates that the company would be responsible for the “deforestation of 118,310 hectares of forest” from February 2022 to July 2024, three quarters of which would be in the Amazon.

Very interesting and balanced is this article on Mercosur (EU-Mercosur, what the free trade agreement with South America provides for and why farmers are calling for it to be blocked) which, at one point, says: “The fact, EU executive sources explain, is that: the EU-Mercosur Agreement is in danger of being erected as a totem against which to hurl their frustration at problems in the sector that actually have an entirely different origin: first and foremost, the low profitability of the land trades compared to the rest of the economy, which pushes young people away from the sector and penalises the producing companies.

Those who have done little or nothing, like Coldiretti , in recent years to protect the profitability of Italian farmers, are therefore looking for a scapegoat outside, on which to make propaganda.

Coldiretti has moved against insects, against ‘synthetic meat’, against Chinese tomatoes or to try, with little success, to create a brand of pasta. Not to mention the Mattei Plan in Africa.

Now, instead, we need to know how things stand, on duties but above all on farmers’ incomes and address their real problems, which you can read about here : Farmers return with tractors to the streets to demand extraordinary interventions.

The Italian government seems, fortunately, to have adopted a pragmatic position on the agreement : French and Polish farmers against the Mercosur agreement.

Reciprocità e clausole di salvaguardia Coldiretti settembre 2025

However, we agree with Coldiretti on two points: safeguard clauses and reciprocity agreements.

On the safeguard clauses, Brussels intends to supplement the agreement with a ‘legal act’ to strengthen the safeguard measures for ‘sensitive European products’, an addition welcomed, for example, by Paris.

The European executive has pledged to intervene in the event of negative impacts of imports on certain sectors, such as beef, poultry, sugar and ethanol.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she had ‘listened carefully’ to farmers and member states. ‘We have put in place even stronger and legally binding guarantees to reassure them,’ she said on the social network X.

For France, for example, a safeguard clause must “ be able to be activated by a single country and not by several countries” and must be able to be “temporarily applied before a final decision is taken “, she said, referring to meetings held this afternoon by Annie Genevard, French Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, with organisations in the agricultural sector.

On reciprocity – we have already written about it – a sensitive issue concerns health and environmental standards. European farmers accuse their Latin American competitors of not meeting EU standards due to a lack of controls.

It is the same pattern with attempts to impose US food imports (e.g. meat with hormones).

On these two issues, we need to proceed with great caution and concrete guarantees.

Below: Brazilian zebu used to make Rigamonti bresaola, which belongs to JBS.