An investigation by The New York Times combined hours-long staking with data reports and found that hides from illegal deforestation can easily enter the global market.
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In July 2021, the New York Times Pulitzer Center reported that researcher Manuela Andreoni (Manuela Andreoni) camped for several hours outside the slaughterhouse near the Jaci-Paraná reserve in Brazil. She is tracking a truck that she suspects is delivering leather from cattle raised in illegally deforested forests to a supplier of an American car seat manufacturer. A few days ago, Victorson Hill, a photographer working for The New York Times, nearly stepped on a poisonous snake.
Thousands of miles away in New York, the graphics editor of the New York Times, Albert Sun, analyzed data on the location of cattle farms in the Amazon. Hiroko Tabuchi, an investigative journalist for The Climate Group, traces the leather supply chain back to the car manufacturer.
Jesse Pesta, Associate Editor of The Times Climate and Environmental Reporting, directs a team of reporters that has been investigating Brazil's leather supply chain for months. The resulting article was published last week, revealing how American demand for luxury cars and SUV leather seats has increased deforestation in the Amazon.
In a recent conversation, Ms. Andreoni discussed how the team completed the survey and how she persuaded people to open their hearts. They include ranchers who raise cattle on illegally deforested land, middlemen who trade cattle, and 71-year-old rubber tree picker Lourenço Durães, who said he faces death threats because his land is valuable. For the sake of space and clarity, her answer has been edited.
Why did you decide to continue this story? Deforestation in the Amazon is an issue that affects the lives of people on the planet, but understanding of the role played by multinational companies that provide products such as leather car seats to wealthy countries is still limited. We want to prove this.
We have obtained years of cattle movement data, which is really difficult to obtain, and this provides us with a unique opportunity to expose loopholes that allow leather from illegal deforestation to reach American consumers.
How does data analysis provide information for field reports, and vice versa? This is interesting because when I arrived in Rondônia on Amazon, a farmer said, "Oh yes, come here to see me selling some cows", and we have been investigating the middleman for months-I d Saw his Facebook page many times-there! This is why on-site reports are so valuable. We did an analysis that showed signs of washing cattle, but we wanted to see if the farmer transactions we observed in the data matched what we saw on the ground. Can we see other companies buying products from middlemen on the same day that they buy products from the farmers we interviewed? Yes, we can.
What is your biggest challenge? The protected area on which our report is based is a conflict zone, and land disputes can sometimes become fierce. The traditional communities there are very scared and it is difficult to reach them because there is no cell phone signal. But in the end I did find someone [Lourenço Durães]. He told me that he had reported death threats to the police, but no one was investigating. So, he was very happy that we were there and someone cared about what he was going through. That is an important part of the story.
What is the daily report on this story? We want to talk to as many people as possible and understand as many steps of the supply chain as possible. But in order to obtain important field facts and interviews, there are a lot of driving and waiting. I followed a truck for hours, looking for farms on these unnamed dirt roads. Then, reaching Lorenzo was much more difficult than we planned. I finally got there in this very old canoe with many holes. The motor broke many times, so it took about five hours.
Ranchers who raise cattle on illegally logged land in the Amazon are very frank and even agree to take pictures and allow you to observe the transaction. How did you gain his trust? When Brazil was under dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1980s, the military government wanted to occupy the Amazon River to ensure the security of the country's borders, and there were other reasons. They tell people, "Come to Amazon, and we will give you free land." It's a bit like the United States rushing to the West. That was decades ago, but the sentiment that you can occupy the land and cut it down and that it is your land still exists. In essence, this is something that has been done for a long time, so people are willing to talk about it because basically they don't think it is a bad thing, even though they may know it is illegal.
How did the Brazilian people react to this story? The most powerful response we got happened a week after our story aired. A state prosecutor referred to our report in his oral argument to the local court, which is evaluating whether a law that almost abolished the Jaci-Paraná reserve should be established. The court decided to repeal the law.
Where do we go from here? I know many people say that they will never buy leather seats again, but experts say that we should not give them up because the beef trade in Brazil is so large that not using leather means that many will only go to landfills. But maybe people and companies can use this knowledge to influence a very important supply chain that is a powerful driver of deforestation, especially in Brazil, but also in other places.