Brazil, again, offers a strong example: Some companies that slaughter cows for beef say they’re monitoring their supply chains to ensure that they aren’t driving deforestation; they’ve agreed to only source cattle from suppliers without recent forest loss. Yet those same cattle may have traveled through several other farms where deforestation happened before reaching the slaughterhouses’ direct suppliers, according to Amintas Brandão Jr., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison. So in reality, those companies are implicated in environmental harm and misleading consumers.
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