The world’s largest meat company is preparing to build a sprawling industrial beef operation in Nigeria—its first on the African continent—but has not revealed details about its plans, prompting a challenge by environmental advocates.
JBS, the Brazilian beef juggernaut plagued by corruption scandals and ongoing links to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, announced its first foray into Africa in 2024 after signing an agreement with the Nigerian government. The company says it will open at least six slaughterhouses in the country, investing $2.5 billion, nearly half of its broader $6 billion global expansion plans.
“It’s a bridgehead into a growing continent,” said Alex Wijeratna, an attorney with Mighty Earth, an advocacy group that has tracked JBS’s connections to deforestation and sued it in the past for making climate-related promises that conflict with its business plans. “There’s a lot of food insecurity across the nation, across the continent, so there’s concern. What are the terms of this investment? What analysis have they done? What information have they released into the public domain? What kind of impact will that have on landscapes, deforestation?”
A recent analysis found JBS’s emissions of methane, the short-lived but especially potent greenhouse gas, exceeded those of Shell and ExxonMobil combined in 2023.
In April of last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allowed JBS to list on the New York Stock Exchange after the company campaigned for a decade to get its approval. The SEC’s greenlight came only days after new campaign filings showed that a major subsidiary of JBS gave $5 million to President Donald Trump’s election campaign, the largest of any company.
Lawmakers from both parties pushed against the listing, which now allows JBS to tap into U.S. capital markets to fund its expansion.
As part of that listing process, JBS reincorporated in the Netherlands, where corporations often seek tax exemptions under Dutch law. But, critics say, it may have made a strategic mistake: Dutch law requires companies to meet a “duty of care,” in line with international human rights laws, which encompasses harms caused by planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
In April, Netherlands-based Greenpeace International sent a letter to JBS alleging that the company is in violation of Dutch law and that its expansion into Nigeria and elsewhere could cause further climate, environmental and human rights damage. In the letter, which represents the first step toward a lawsuit, Greenpeace also requested details of JBS’s planned Nigeria expansion, a legal maneuver under a newly passed Dutch law that allows entities to demand specific details on Dutch companies if they intend to sue them.
“Greenpeace Netherlands believes JBS holds a special position as one of the most
climate polluting and ecosystem damaging meat companies in the world,” the letter said, arguing that JBS “has a duty of care under Dutch law that requires the company to refrain from conduct that violates human rights, in particular the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and to take reasonable measures to prevent harm to people and the planet.”
The letter was sent April 30, the day of JBS’s first annual meeting in the Netherlands, held at a hotel near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, where protesters gathered with a banner reading, “JBS: Keep your bloody business out of Africa.”
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The letter asks that JBS provide “certain information relating to its impact on people and the planet, as well as the steps it takes to measure and mitigate that impact, whether contained in documents or obtainable through the hearing of witnesses or independent expert reviews.”
In its response to the letter, dated May 21, JBS declined to provide the information and said the company “complies with laws and regulations and believes it is well positioned to support food security in markets around the world. Your letter ignores both the pressing need for food security and the aim for food independence in local markets around the globe, as well as geopolitical dynamics at play.”
Opponents, including Nigerian civil society groups, say the lack of transparency from JBS and the Nigerian government means it is unclear how the projects will impact not only the environment, but also livelihoods in pastoralist communities that still dominate much of the rural countryside.
“They’ve been remarkably opaque,” said Richard Brown, a Greenpeace International attorney. “We know that they entered into an agreement 18 months ago and we know that they are planning to invest $2.5 billion in Nigeria and they’ve been talking to people in Nigeria and preparatory work is underway, but the detail is really, really sketchy. They are operating in the shadows.”
Some activists have said they believe most of the processed meat will not end up in Nigeria, but rather be sent to wealthy Middle Eastern countries.
JBS did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News.
Greenpeace maintains that the case could establish “a new frontier in the fight against climate change” and if successful “could set a major precedent for future legal challenges against the industrial agriculture sector, which is a major source of methane emissions.”
In 2019, the Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth, Milieudefensie, sued Netherlands-based Shell in an effort to force the oil giant to reduce its emissions in line with the target of the 2015 Paris Agreement. A Dutch court in 2021 ruled in Milieudefensie’s favor, saying Shell had breached its duty of care under Dutch law. That ruling was overturned in 2024, but the court maintained the company still had an obligation to reduce emissions.
The case against JBS is being made on similar grounds.
“The Milieudefensie case made it clear that when you have big-emitting companies, they have a special obligation to reduce emissions,” Brown said. “What is being argued is that JBS is essentially a growth stock—its business model is based on aggressive global expansion—and in order to act in accordance with the Dutch law, as a Dutch company, which is what they now are, they have to have regard in their investment decisions to what that means for a livable planet.”
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Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News, and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and she was twice named the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, once with ICN colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic’s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.