Monitoring of the cattle supply chain in the Cerrado faces a structural limitation that must be understood beyond the numbers: most control systems developed to date were created to respond to deforestation in the Amazon. The Cattle TACs, audit protocols, and supplier monitoring systems were built over years of pressure concentrated in that biome, driven by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, civil society organizations, and international buyers demanding guarantees regarding beef origin. The result was a reasonably developed set of tools for the Amazon, but one that was not designed for the specificities of the Cerrado.

These specificities matter. In the Cerrado, as already discussed, a significant share of deforestation occurs legally on private rural properties. This means that verifying whether illegal deforestation has occurred is not sufficient: it is also necessary to determine whether the company has a policy to avoid recent conversion of native vegetation even when legally authorized, if that is the commitment it has publicly assumed. This is a more demanding and more difficult criterion to verify than simple legal compliance.

The data illustrate the scale of the challenge. The Cerrado contains 1,365,597 farms, of which 973,705, or 71%, have pasture areas of at least one hectare. To understand what this means in monitoring terms, it is necessary to consider where these farms are located. Only 209,481 of them, or 22% of the total with pasture, are located within the Legal Amazon, which is precisely the region where meatpacking company traceability systems have historically been concentrated. The remaining 764,224 farms with pasture, representing 78% of the total, are located outside this boundary and, in practice, beyond the effective reach of any existing monitoring mechanism.

Put simply, the vast majority of properties potentially supplying cattle in the Cerrado operate without any effective verification by beef companies. Each of these properties represents a potential entry point for cattle originating from deforested areas into the formal supply chain, without any effective oversight.

This gap is not accidental. It derives directly from the way deforestation commitments have been structured over the years: restricted to the Legal Amazon and focused almost exclusively on direct suppliers, that is, the farm selling cattle directly to the meatpacking company. In the Cerrado, where 70% of pasture farms are concentrated outside the Legal Amazon, monitoring is minimal or simply non-existent.

The problem deepens when examining the indirect supply chain. Indirect suppliers are the farms through which the animal passed before reaching the direct supplier, during the breeding and rearing stages. These properties are subject to a much lower level of monitoring than direct suppliers and, in most cases, are not monitored at all. Considering that the Cerrado contains nearly one million pasture farms, the absence of deforestation commitments covering this indirect supply chain makes supply chain control structurally insufficient: even if a meatpacking company verifies the farm selling directly to it, the animal may have passed through several other properties beforehand, none of which were verified.

For effective supply chain control to advance in the Cerrado, beef companies will need to adapt their traceability systems to the biome by incorporating land tenure databases, environmental data, animal transit information, Rural Environmental Registry records, and criteria specific to the region’s characteristics. Without this adaptation, most of the supply chain will remain beyond the effective reach of any verification, regardless of the commitments publicly declared by companies.