Meat giant profits from carbon market without halting deforestation

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🗞️ Driving the news: Brazilian meat giant Minerva Foods is under scrutiny for profiting from carbon markets through its subsidiary MyCarbon, despite ongoing deforestation in its supply chain
• Investigations reveal that MyCarbon’s carbon credit projects lack transparency, overstate impact areas, and fail to prove additional emissions reductions — raising doubts about their legitimacy
• Critics warn the company’s credits, largely sold to oil producers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, enable continued fossil fuel expansion under a green veneer

🔭 The context: Founded in 2021, MyCarbon was designed to generate and broker carbon credits, capitalising on soaring demand from oil producers seeking to offset emissions
• Brazil, home to the Cerrado and Amazon biomes, has become a leading supplier of carbon offsets despite persistent land-use violations in agribusiness
• Minerva trails only JBS in Brazil’s meat sector, which has long faced criticism for driving deforestation, particularly through unmonitored indirect suppliers

🌍 Why it matters for the planet: Weak carbon credit oversight risks undermining the integrity of global climate action
• MyCarbon’s projects illustrate how poorly designed offsets can fail to halt ecosystem destruction, while legitimising high-emissions industries like oil and industrial meat
• Such practices jeopardise biodiversity, displace local communities, and mislead investors and consumers about genuine emissions reductions
• Strengthening monitoring, verification, and supply chain transparency is crucial to restoring credibility in carbon markets

⏭️ What's next: MyCarbon’s projects are still undergoing validation by certifier Verra, which has received formal comments citing incomplete data, questionable additionality, and opaque stakeholder engagement
• Brazilian authorities and NGOs are calling for stricter oversight of carbon projects and more robust enforcement of deforestation-free commitments
• Internationally, voluntary carbon market regulators face mounting pressure to curb greenwashing and improve standards ahead of COP30 in Belém in 2025

💬 One quote: “Carbon credits should help offset emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, but certainly not prop up industries that ought to be phased out,” — Shigueo Watanabe, a ClimaInfo researcher

📈 One stat: MyCarbon claims its projects could span up to 350 million hectares — 41% of Brazil’s territory — though current verified areas remain minimal and poorly documented

See on illuminem's Data Hub™ the sustainability performance of agriculture companies like Minerva Foods and its peers JBS, Marfrig, and BRF

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