"Devouring The Rainforest" Article Analysis Essay Sample

Terrence McCoy, the Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, and Júlia Ledur, a graphics reporter covering foreign news, (appositive phrase) in their Washington Post climate and environment article “Devouring The Rainforest” (29 April 2022) report that American citizens’ contribution to climate change increases as the U.S increases purchases of cattle raised on illegally defrosted areas in the Amazon.

Attempting to root out all of their suppliers taking part in deforestation, (participle phrase) JBS, a major beef company responsible for supplying American companies like Kroger and Goya Foods, refuses to purchase cattle from ranchers who illegally deforest  the land; however, the incredibly vast size of the Amazon makes it hard to monitor and even harder for companies like JBS to attain an entirely legal supply chain, a problem McCoy and Ledur further develop by exposing that despite the company’s attempts at being environmentally friendly, “records show JBS factories… made at least 1,673 cattle purchases from 114 ranchers who at the time owned at least one property cited for illegal deforestation.”

McCoy and Ledur add context to the growing difficulty in addressing this problem by detailing a strategy ranchers devised to work around the system called cattle laundering which includes moving cattle from ranch to ranch to hide their illegal origins; additionally, Unlike its neighboring country Argentina, Brazil doesn’t track cattle individually making it even easier for ranchers to simply ship their cattle to properties with clean environmental records where “they are cleansed and ready to be sold to producers such as JBS for slaughter and shipment.”

While individuals tend to feel that environmental destruction is out of their hands, (adverb clause) the implications of an American citizen’s participation in purchasing beef sourced from Brazil suggest that our hands are dirty and partially responsible for the destruction of the Amazon which raises concerns as the rainforest “is a vital carbon sink that scientists say must be preserved to avert catastrophic warming."