The world’s biggest meat company, JBS, faces a landmark legal challenge to disclose how its $6bn (£4.5bn) global expansion plan is compatible with responsibilities to the climate, nature and human rights.
Courts in the Netherlands, where JBS is headquartered, will assess the petition filed by Greenpeace for information on whether the company is compliant with Dutch laws on “duty of care” as well as its own publicly stated commitments.
Lawyers said the case opened a new frontier in the fight against climate change, potentially creating a precedent for legal challenges against the agriculture sector, which is the biggest cause of deforestation and a major source of methane emissions.
“The primary objective is to challenge JBS’s business model and expansion model,” said Richard Brown, legal counsel at Greenpeace International. “We have a suspicion that they’re flying blind and not pulling together the information they need to understand the impacts.”
He said the request for information is a preliminary stage towards filing formal litigation against the multinational meat company.
Until now similar lawsuits have only been filed against fossil fuel companies. Last month, a Paris court ruled that the French oil company TotalEnergies must disclose the climate risks linked to emissions from its oil and gas products, and set out plans to address them in a case brought by NGOs and the city of Paris, but did not order specific measures such as limiting overseas exploration and production.
In the Netherlands, Shell is being challenged in The Hague by environmental groups Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) and Friends of the Earth to reduce the company’s carbon dioxide output by 45% by 2030 in line with the Paris climate agreement. A final ruling is expected in early 2027.
At the centre of the petition against JBS is a perceived lack of transparency over its massive expansion plans in Nigeria. In the coming years, the meat company plans to invest $2.5bn in six giant meat-processing plants that are seen as a bridgehead to the fast-growing African market.
Civil society groups say there is scant information about whether JBS has assessed the social and environmental consequences of this plan, which would threaten smallholder farmers, domestic food security, land-use priorities, as well as locking in huge quantities of methane emissions. Methane is one of the most climate-destabilising greenhouse gases.
“This is the biggest agriculture investment that I have heard of in Nigeria’s history but there have been few details and no consultation for civil society,” said Elujulo Opeyemi, the spokesperson for Youth in Agroecology and Restoration Network.
“The information is not there. We want the Nigerian government to take a pause until we can make a concrete cost-benefit analysis. This investment will only be worthwhile if it is good for the people and planet. Otherwise it will just create more problems.”
To illustrate the risks, he said the Niger state government has already promised 1.2m hectares to JBS.
JBS, which was founded in Brazil in 1953, moved its headquarters to the Netherlands last year as part of its strategy to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The shift allowed the company to tap international financial markets for expansion funds, and to enable the founding family’s Batista brothers – Joesley and Wesley Batista – to significantly raise their ownership stake.
But the move to Europe also exposed the company to more rigorous transparency rules. “We say that if you come to the Netherlands, you have to play by Dutch rules and be held to account to Dutch standards,” said Brown. “Ultimately this is about a global conglomerate and how its activities should be limited within safe planetary boundaries.”
Behind the lawsuit is dismay at JBS’s environmental track record, particularly in its home country, Brazil, where it has repeatedly made sustainability commitments that it later abandoned or postponed.
Beef production is the primary driver of deforestation, as trees are cleared to raise cattle, and scientists warn this has pushed the Amazon close to a tipping point that would accelerate its shift from a carbon sink into a carbon emitter. JBS, which dominates the Brazilian cattle market, promised to address this with a commitment to clean up its beef supply chain in the region by the end of 2025. But the Guardian and its investigative partners revealed last year that JBS would break its promise. JBS then failed to meet its year-end deadline and has since scrapped its “net zero by 2040” pledge. Its latest sustainability report also excluded the calculations of indirect emissions, primarily methane, from cows – which are a primary component of JBS’s climate impact.
Marieke Vellekoop, the executive director at Greenpeace Netherlands, said that the NGO had been left with “no choice but to seek our right to information through the Dutch courts.”
Opeyemi said Nigeria needed transparency from JBS to ensure the full consequences of its planned investment can be calculated for the people, the environment and the wider region. “Once JBS has a foothold in Nigeria, they can encroach across Africa. That’s why the Nigerian government has to get this right,” he said. “This court case is helpful so we can get clarity.”
In an email to the Guardian, JBS said it “does not comment on potential legal proceedings of which it has not been notified”.