Why 'King of Cattle' is embracing a plan to save the Amazon

Decades of ranching in the Amazon have earned Roque Quagliato, Brazil's "King of Cattle," great wealth — and some trouble.

- Manuela Andreoni and Ana Mano, Reuters

His family’s immense farms were accused of submitting workers to slavery-like conditions in the 1990s and deforesting huge tracts of the rainforest in the early 2000's. But as Brazil's beef industry evolves under pressure from some of the world’s greatest export markets, Quagliato, at 85, is now in evidence for something else: he is the face of the push to fix cattle ranching in the Amazon, one of the world’s biggest drivers of deforestation. Quagliato’s cattle were the first to be tagged with chips in their ears as part of a government program to make millions of cattle in the Amazonian state of Para traceable around the time world leaders arrive there for the United Nations climate summit in November.

“What we hope is that, at the end, the international market gives Brazil a better price,” he said at the sidelines of a recent cattle auction in Xinguara, one of the beef capitals of Para. Deforesters, he added, are now “a matter for jail.” Quagliato has his eyes on exporting pricier and more demanding markets in the United States, Europe and Asia, some of which buy from Brazilian states but not Para at least partly because of concerns around animal health and links to deforestation. “Brazil is hustling to open high-demand markets such as Japan and South Korea, and improving its traceability system is one of the key steps to reaching that goal,” said Renan Araujo, a senior market analyst at S&P Global.