'How JBS — the World’s Largest Meat Company — Avoids Paying Taxes’ 16 July 2025

JBS, the world’s largest meat company, is poised for an explosive level of growth in the coming years. The multinational meat giant, headquartered in Brazil, recently made its highly contested debut on the New York Stock Exchange. The move is anticipated to expand the company’s access to capital markets and enable its continued global expansion — but this comes at a steep cost to climate. Beef is already the largest driver of food-related emissions, and climate models suggest there is no way to stave off the worst effects of global warming without cutting back on beef consumption. Yet JBS’s newfound access to capital is all but guaranteed to enable the meat giant to keep expanding. This sweeping expansion is also a deeply troubling development for the many advocates monitoring the company’s long history of environmental destruction, human rights abuses and animal cruelty.

JBS’s global dominance has also been fueled by another strategy: tax avoidance. As the $77.2 billion meat mega-corporation comes to control an even larger share of the global market, tax experts tell Sentient the move is unlikely to be followed by a proportional hike in JBS’s taxes, especially in the countries that account for a large percent of its sales, like the United States. Like many multinational companies, JBS has an intricate corporate structure that enables the company to strategically avoid paying taxes by shifting money to more favorable jurisdictions, known as tax havens because of their sparse corporate tax obligations. The strategy shields JBS from paying taxes in the countries where it conducts the bulk of its business — in terms of both its sales and meat production facilities — to countries removed from its principal operations. Environmental advocates argue that these corporate tax havens hinder climate progress, enabling JBS and many of the world’s largest polluters to avoid paying taxes that could be used to fund investment in climate solutions.

…JBS’s unrestricted expansion has become a roadblock to achieving global climate goals, yet it gets little public attention…JBS’s expansion serves to hinder progress on human and animal rights issues too. The company has a long, very checkered history of paving its expansion through highly unethical business practices, including illegal deforestation and destruction of Indigenous land, documented incidents of modern slavery in the company’s supply chain, working conditions linked to deaths during COVID-19 and other serious injuries in its meatpacking plants, and a well-documented track record of egregious animal welfare violations — incidents that JBS has largely been able to maintain as a business practice by paying government fines and settlement fees.