Representatives of cattle ranchers' unions in the country deny what a public report claims...that the meat exported to the United States comes from farms in indigenous community areas, which have been suffering from settler violence for years. The ranchers claim that the country has all the necessary regulations to guarantee that the cattle come from farms registered outside of protected areas or indigenous territories, and rather, they point out that this type of information could affect a very important market for the Nicaraguan economy...

Ronald Blandón, general manager of Nicaragua's National Livestock Commission (Conagan), explains that meat exports to the United States are not recent, but date back years, so mentioning that the country took advantage of the pandemic to boost that market does not make much sense.

Annually, the growth of meat exports is between 10 and 12 percent, which has been the same trend of the last 15 years, explained Blandón...Blandón states that in Nicaragua all the animals arrive to the slaughterhouses, auctions, municipal traces, identified, and it is the Institute of Agricultural Protection and Health (IPSA) who is in charge of delivering the earrings with which the cattle are marked. There are 136,000 farms in the country and all of them are located outside of the reserve areas, he said. At the same time, he points out that there is a change in attitude of the typical Nicaraguan cattle rancher and that they promote a cattle raising with silvopasture systems that protect the natural resources...

For his part, Solón Guerrero, vice president of the Federation of Livestock Associations (Faganic), explained that...the union, along with processing plants, prepares a series of documents that prove that all the meat that is exported has the controls and sanitary measures...On the other hand, there is the veneer and the traceability projects, which allow that at the moment that an animal is delivered, it is known from which farm it comes, since each one has a code...