The relationship between deforestation and cattle ranching in Colombia is increasingly evident. While meat consumption is growing, the country is facing a silent crisis: thousands of hectares of forest are being replaced by pastures in key regions of the Amazon and Orinoco. This article explores how the lack of effective traceability in the livestock chain allows meat from deforested areas to enter the legal market unchecked, and what initiatives are underway to change this reality.
Meat consumption in Colombia
Have you ever thought about where the meat you buy at the neighborhood butcher's, supermarket or market place comes from?
In Colombia, each person consumes on average more than 17 kilos of beef per year, which makes it an essential part of our diet (Econexia, 2025). However, we rarely ask ourselves where the meat comes from, that is, beyond the butcher from whom we buy it. Very briefly, the livestock production cycle includes three stages: breeding, when the calf is born and stays with its mother; rearing, when it grows and is fed until it reaches an adequate weight; and fattening, where it is prepared for slaughter. Although these stages appear to be linear, in practice the animal's journey can be fragmented and cross different regions of the country.
Traceability is a tool that allows us to trace and identify the origin of the products we consume, and in the case of the Colombian livestock industry, it has become an environmental, legal and political concern. This is because the reality is that most Colombians are not sure how the meat we consume was produced or what footprint it left in its path.
How to lose track of livestock
Delving a little deeper into the meat's journey before it reaches our plate, it is even longer than it appears on the surface. The production cycle does not always occur in a single place: an animal may be born on a farm located in a particular region, then raised on a completely different farm, fattened on a third farm and finally transported to a slaughterhouse in yet another municipality. This transit between farms -livestock production units- does not leave a clear environmental record, much less a continuous history that allows tracing its real origin. As analyst Cristian Salas (FCDS) explains, "every time an animal is moved, its environmental history is cut short". Only by crossing multiple bases -vaccination, mobilization and forest cover data- can its trajectory be reconstructed, something that today is not institutionalized.
This is when the complicated figure of intermediaries appears, whether they are livestock auctions, informal stockpilers or unregistered traders. They may buy animals in environmentally critical areas or areas of recent deforestation and sell them in regions with no environmental record, causing all information regarding the problematic origin of the animal to be lost.
What is normally reported to the consumer corresponds to the last point of contact in the chain, generally the feedlot or slaughterhouse, which erases the entire past of the animal and with it, the land it occupied. This disconnection allows cattle from highly deforested areas, such as Meta (or regions with Amazon rainforest such as Caquetá and Guaviare), to move to regions with no environmental history, thus legitimizing their entry into legal marketing circuits.
In regions such as San Vicente del Caguán, there are hundreds of villages that are not even officially georeferenced. If a property does not have an exact location, there is no way to know if there has been deforestation or to verify the history of the cattle that have passed through it.
From regions such as Guaviare, cattle ranching leaders warn that demonizing cattle ranching without recognizing its historical roots and local economic weight only deepens the disconnection between national policy and territorial reality.
Deforestation and extensive cattle ranching: a model for land grabbing
The most paradoxical thing is that this expansion occurs even when there are clear alternatives to increase livestock productivity without the need to cut down one more hectare, as the people behind Aval Ganso or Fedegán's sustainability officers point out. Logging is no longer done just to plant pasture or to raise more cattle.
In many cases, cattle ranching fulfills a different function: to legitimize the illegal occupation of lands that belong to the Nation. In areas such as Mapiripán, lower Putumayo or Catatumbo, illegal crops have been replaced by livestock investment, not as a food strategy but as a way of laundering illegal capital. After logging, cattle are introduced as a strategy to justify a productive use of the land, which makes it possible to fence it, divide it up and eventually request its legalization or sale, in many cases taking advantage of legal loopholes in land tenure and land titling regulations. This pattern is repeated especially in protected areas such as natural parks, forest reserves and wastelands, where the forest is replaced by silent pastures. Extensive cattle ranching, when it is not regulated or linked to reliable traceability systems, becomes a productive facade: it does not necessarily seek to produce meat, but to mark territory. In this context, meat is not the final objective, but the visible cover of a deeper territorial model.
Why current livestock traceability does not curb deforestation
Part of the problem is that the existing systems for tracking livestock in Colombia were not designed to respond to the environmental challenges we face today. The main official mechanism, known as SINIGAN (National Livestock Identification and Information System), was created with a sanitary focus: it records vaccination campaigns and, in some cases, animal movements to prevent outbreaks of diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease. But this system does not record the farm of birth, nor its complete geographic history, much less whether the land through which it moved was deforested, illegally occupied or located within protected areas.
In reality, the traceability system in Colombia was built in a fragmented manner, with platforms designed for different functions and without effective interoperability. SINIGAN, SNIITA, the Health Guides and the Forest Monitoring System (SMBYC) operate as islands, without an integration that would allow for robust farm, environmental and commercial traceability. For traceability to be environmentally meaningful, it would be necessary to uniquely identify the farm and the animal, establish a baseline of forest cover, apply continuous satellite monitoring and cross-check this information with the subsequent trade of the product.
Other mechanisms such as the MRV protocol -implemented as part of the Zero Deforestation Agreements- have attempted to fill these gaps, but so far their use has been limited, voluntary and focused on certain regions. Under this protocol, High Surveillance Zones (HSZ) were defined as critical deforestation areas to be monitored by satellite through the Forest Monitoring System (SMBYC). However, in practice, the pressure on the forest is shifting to lands outside the scope of the protocol, generating a phenomenon of institutional evasion, in which the actors responsible for deforestation manage to relocate off the State's radar, moving faster than public policy.
In this institutional labyrinth, information exists in a dispersed form, but it is not cross-referenced, demanded or converted into effective public policy.
And the most serious thing: it is not public either. Despite the fact that the traceability system should be at the service of the general interest, access to data on farms, cattle movements or risk zones has been recurrently blocked by the ICA and some private actors, who invoke the Habeas Data Law to restrict access to information that should be of public interest. This interpretation, which equates traceability data with protected personal information, has prevented journalists, social organizations and citizens from exercising effective control over the origin of meat. According to Cristian Salas, "only with a call from someone at the highest level of the Ministry could you get anything".
Meanwhile, the cattle continue to move without anyone, not even the State, being able to tell their full story.
Who benefits from the current system?
As we pointed out earlier, behind every hectare of forest cleared there is not always a subsistence farmer; there are organized structures that benefit from the institutional vacuum. In many regions of the Amazon and Orinoco, extensive cattle ranching has been used as a façade to facilitate the illegal grabbing of public lands. Often, behind the chainsaw and fencing are actors with economic, political or criminal power: investors who finance deforestation, networks that control auctions and informal commercialization, or even local authorities who benefit from the occupation. This does not mean that all extensive cattle ranching operates this way. But the current model allows some to do so without consequences. In this opaque transit, while the meat circulates without history, what really changes hands is the territory.
In addition, the abandonment of the countryside by the State has profoundly weakened the conditions for planned, accompanied and sustainable livestock production. In addition, many young people are no longer interested in continuing with these activities, which has aged the productive base of the countryside. In this generational and political vacuum, actors with greater economic power find a free path to expand extensive models without environmental control or territorial planning.
In parallel, the international scenario has also accelerated the debate. The recent European Union regulation against the importation of products associated with deforestation has been a key catalyst to promote internal transformations in producer countries such as Colombia. In addition, embassies such as those of Norway, the United Kingdom and Germany have also expressed interest in supporting this process of institutional transformation.
Towards real environmental traceability: the bill underway
Faced with this reality, efforts are already underway to change the rules of the game. At this moment, the Congress of the Republic is studying a bill on environmental traceability for livestock: a tool that would make it possible to know from which farm each animal originates, if that territory was deforested and if the final product complies with legality and sustainability criteria. The initiative, led by congressmen Juan Carlos Losada and Julia Miranda, proposes to integrate existing monitoring systems, make the use of the Colombian Environmental Seal mandatory, and prevent the marketing of meat from protected or recently deforested areas.
This seal is based on Colombian Technical Standard 6550:2021, which establishes criteria for deforestation-free livestock production, with farm traceability and social and environmental guarantees. However, very few consumers are aware of this label, and its implementation has not yet been institutionalized or clearly disseminated.
Although the existence of this seal is an important step, the model of meat with traceability and sustainable practices implies higher production costs, especially for small farmers seeking certification. The problem is that most consumers still do not prioritize origin when buying meat, which hinders the economic viability of more responsible initiatives that do not find sufficient support in purchasing behavior.
On the other hand, many retail companies have no real incentive to change their sourcing practices, unless there is a clear regulation requiring it. Therefore, beyond the symbol, the seal needs to be accompanied by public policies that align prices, requirements and expectations.
Local actors have proposed differential pricing schemes as a tangible incentive for forest conservationists. The possibility of receiving a higher payment for sustainable practices could make a difference in territories where the market does not yet recognize these efforts. At the trade union level, self-regulation efforts have also emerged, such as the Aval Ganso, an initiative that promotes deforestation-free livestock production through environmental, social and land monitoring. However, this type of scheme still lacks the necessary incentives to extend its reach to small and medium-sized producers.
For its part, the Colombian Federation of Cattle Raisers (Fedegán) has participated technically in the development of the bill, defending farm and individual traceability, and seeking its alignment with international sustainability standards.
The mandatory inclusion of the seal in the bill seeks precisely to turn it into a real tool for transformation, which consumers can recognize, demand and value beyond the symbol.
If passed, this law could be a turning point for the country: it would not only allow it to comply with international conservation commitments, but also give back to the consumer and the State the possibility of controlling what happens in the territory. Because in the end, traceability is not just about data: it is about protecting what belongs to all of us.
