By Leonardo Munhoz, Researcher at Observatório de Bioeconomia da Fundação Getulio Vargas, São Paulo, and Jorge Rezende, law student at Fundação Getúlio Vargas
Traceability for livestock activity is becoming increasingly essential as worldwide demand for exports and more conscious consumption from a socio-environmental perspective grow.
For example, in 2023, the European Parliament adopted the Deforestation Regulation -EUDR (Regulation EU 2023/1115)[i], a significant environmental resolution affecting Brazilian exports.
The EUDR is a regulation that, starting in January 2025, will prohibit the marketing and importation of agricultural products derived from cattle production, coffee, palm oil, timber, rubber, soybeans, and cocoa into European territory if they come from deforestation that occurred after 2020. This regulation aims to preserve forests and biodiversity and combat climate change—the European Union has established that products produced in areas deforested after December 31, 2020, will be prohibited from being traded.
To meet this requirement, the regulation requires traders and importers to submit the following to the competent public authority:
- A risk analysis;
- Product information, e.g.: country of origin risks, forest areas, the presence of Indigenous communities, and forest degradation;
- A history of environmental crimes and non-compliance with socio-environmental criteria, among others.
Similarly, the United Kingdom recently amended its environmental law (Environmental Act of 2021, Schedule 17)[ii] to create its version of the anti-deforestation law. Briefly, the United Kingdom will also require imported agricultural products to prove that they are free from deforestation through audits, environmental regularization, and traceability.
Livestock Traceability in Brazil
Regarding traceability in Brazil, today, the **Animal Transport Guide (GTA)** is a mandatory document in Brazilian territory for the transport of animals, issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Supply (MAPA)[iii], to certify the origin and sanitary safety of the animals. Irregularly transporting animals without the GTA is considered an environmental crime under Federal Law 9.605/1998.
However, the GTA presents problems regarding the individual and complete traceability of the animals, especially concerning the environmental regularization of the properties through which they have passed. The GTA can only show each transportation or movement of the animal from one point to another and does not provide full identification of the animal through all the farms it has passed.
In this context, the Brazilian System of Identification and Certification of Bovine and Buffalo Origin (SISBOV), created by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Supply (MAPA)[iv], aims to be a system of traceability and individual animal identification, targeting exports to the European market and overcoming the limits of the GTA.
However, unlike the GTA, participation in SISBOV is voluntary. This voluntary participation is done through the interested party’s agreement, and individual animal identification must be done using at least one standard SISBOV ear tag. All this data must be registered in the SISBOV system for official control.
But for the EUDR, this individual traceability of the animal is only half the challenge. Farmers and industry must attest that this animal did not originate from rural properties that experienced deforestation after 2020. For this, it will be necessary to cross the individual traceability data of the animal with the environmental data of the rural properties it passed through during its lifetime until slaughter.
In this regard, Brazil has the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), in which the producer already informs the competent state authority of the environmental status of their rural property, identifying possible deficits in permanent preservation areas (APP) and/or Legal Reserves (RL), as well as consolidated use areas, with the respective geolocation—some points required by the EUDR. In other words, the CAR has the potential to be a helpful tool within the EUDR scope.[v]
However, the CAR needs to have its information validated by environmental agencies. In this sense, CAR validation remains a significant bottleneck, with almost all states in Brazil lagging, except São Paulo with 92%, Espírito Santo, and Pará with 70% of the analysis completed.
Returning to traceability, while the advantages of the SISBOV system are that it works on the basis of individual identification (i.e., bovine ear tag), showing data on the animal’s entire life and all the rural establishments the animal has passed through, this system still does not permit the crossing of data with CAR. The GTA, however, has an even greater limitation as it cannot trace the entire movement of the animal throughout its life.
Thus, three major challenges arise here: expanding the scope of SISBOV nationwide, which is currently voluntary; validating the environmental data of rural properties in the CAR; and cross-referencing the data from these two systems, certifying the environmental compliance of the Brazilian cattle herd – for EUDR purposes and similar laws, the SISBOV eventually will have to become mandatory.
Additionally, this necessary merging of the agendas for animal traceability and environmental regularization of properties is currently omitted from the regulatory texts of SISBOV and GTA. At the state level, the only state outlining a solution to this problem is Pará.
Pará State at the Forefront of Traceability
Given the Pará State will host COP30 in 2025, it has recently started working on an individual animal traceability agenda. The state initiative was launched during COP 28 in Dubai, with the “Integrity and Development Program of the Pará Bovine Productive Chain, creating the State’s Official Individual Bovine Traceability System (SRBIPA)”, through State Decree 3.533/2023.[vi]
The decree creating SRBIPA does not directly mention the GTA and CAR but, according to its guidelines, it is likely that it will will cross-reference these two types of data – individual cattle traceability with propriety environmental status.
Regarding the environmental legality of farms, this decree expressly mentions that SRBIPA aims to ensure “guarantees of land tenure and socio-environmental regularization related to the herd” and “integration with other state and federal policies aimed at low-emission agriculture, environmental preservation, sustainability, and climate.”
In this sense, although the state of Pará is still in the early stages of its animal traceability system, it is the only one in Brazil so far that explicitly ties the program’s guidelines to environmental data from CAR and the obligations of the Forest Code inherent to rural properties belonging to the state’s livestock chain.
Thus, Brazil will need to resolve the bottlenecks related to individual animal traceability and the validation of environmental data from rural properties and cross-reference both datasets. Only through synchronizing individual traceability and environmental regularization agendas will Brazilian livestock products have the ability to become competitive in international trade. To achieve this, effort will be required; otherwise, instead of being a solution, traceability will become another problem.
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash
[i] Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32023R1115
[ii] Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/30/schedule/17
[iii] See: https://www.gov.br/agricultura/pt-br/assuntos/sanidade-animal-e-vegetal/saude-animal/cgtqa/t_nacional/gta/legislacao
[iv] See: https://www.gov.br/agricultura/pt-br/assuntos/sanidade-animal-e-vegetal/saude-animal/cgtqa/dpc/sisbov
[v] See: Lei No. 12.651, de 25 de Maio de 2012, Diário Oficial da União [D.O.U.] de 28.05.2012 (Braz.).
[vi] See: https://agenciapara.com.br/pauta/9183/governo-do-para-vai-fazer-a-primeira-identificacao-individual-de-bovinos-e-bubalinos-no-estado