Brazilian Beef and Slavery.

So some Brazilian beef might be produced using slaves. To be honest, wouldn’t surprise me. It is worth noting that actually, whatever is happening in the Amazon, most of the beef comes from the southern states:

Alberto Fonseca, the commercial councillor at the Brazilian embassy in London, said it was impossible to say that beef from forest areas cleared with slave labour was not coming to Britain. However, most of the beef that was exported was of the highest quality and came from Sao Paulo state, land that was cleared in the 17th and 18th centuries.

What worried me a little about the compilers of the report is that they don’t seem to understand costs very well:

Cost to produce per kilo: £1.02, includes 90p production plus 12p transport to Europe

(Source: English Beef and Lamb Executive)

Costs include:

• No winter maintenance

• Labour costs

• No vet or medicine bills (paid by government)

• No transport to slaughterhouse (paid by abattoirs)

• Land often unfenced

• Land often not fertilised

• Transport costs (12.5p per kilo)

OK, the vets bills are a subsidy. The maintenance and fertilizer things are pure comparative advantage. But if the abattoirs are paying some of the transport bills, do they really think this makes the beef cheaper? It’s still a cost paid in the supply chain, whether it’s paid by the farmers or the slaughterhouse doesn’t make any difference to the price as it leaves the country or as it arrives in Europe.

Puerly by coincidence I’ve been reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle the past couple of days. Much of the first half is about his travels on the pampas of Uruguay and Argentina, and the southern states of Brazil are very similar. It’s perfect cattle country. It’s exactly the sort of place we should be getting our beef from (absent the slave labour, of course). If, as the figures above show, production and shipping costs are 1.02 a kilo while UK beef (as they claim) is 2.50, assuming again the absence of slave labour, of which no one is claiming there is any in those southern states, then what we should be doing is importing exactly that cheaper beef. We’re making both ourselves and the Brazilians poorer by not doing so.