Dead meat is a dirty business. Brazil has just ordered three more food-processing plants to suspend production, amid an investigation into alleged corruption in the Latin American nation’s meat industry that resulted in a partial ban on products from 21 meat-packing plants. The timing couldn’t be worse. Meat is Brazil’s third-biggest export after soy and iron ore. Foreign sales totalled something like US$13bn last year — it’s one of the more solid sectors in the country’s economy. And Brazil is in the throes of its worst recession on record (it’s had eight consecutive quarters of contraction). There are two big players at the centre of the scandal (along with a raft of smaller meat-packers): JBS, the world’s biggest beef exporter, and BRF, the largest producer of poultry globally — as in, it supplies 126 countries. They’re IPO-big, these two. Both were mooting overseas listings before aspersions were cast. As meat controversies go, they’re not accused of nastiness we haven’t heard o...
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