JBS

Marfrig Global Foods, a Brazilian meat processor, has acquired National Beef for $969 million. The deal will make Marfrig the second-largest beef processor in the world, after Brazil’s JBS.

In December 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out the largest workplace raid in history. They arrested over 1,300 workers in six states, including 300 from Cactus, Texas, a small town with just over 3,000 residents. The Cactus workers were picked up from a meatpacking plant, then owned by Swift & Co. before it was acquired by JBS in 2007.

Meatpacking giant JBS has agreed to sell Five Rivers Cattle Feeding, the world’s largest feedlot operation, to New York-based Pinnacle Asset Management. Five Rivers feeds 900,000 head in multiple states.

Pilgrim's Pride, the second-largest U.S. poultry processor, will buy the European poultry producer Moy Park for $1.3 billion in a deal that its chief executive says will "position Pilgrim's to become a global player," reported Agrimoney. Moy Park claims a 25-percent share of the chicken market in western Europe.

The world's largest meat company, JBS, entwined in a corruption scandal in its home country of Brazil, hired as its global food security Al Almanza, who just retired as head of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. The Organization for Competitive Markets, which focuses on agricultural antitrust issues, called the hiring "the latest of the scandalous job swapping between government and the meat industry."

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, will sell its Five Rivers Cattle Feeding operation as part of a global divestiture plan intended to generate $1.8 billion. Five Rivers operates feedlots in six western states with a combined capacity of 980,000 head and manages a 75,000-head feedlot in Alberta.

JBS chairman Joesley Batista and chief executive Wesley Batista resigned from senior posts "in a corruption scandal that threatens to topple Brazil's president Michel Temer," said Reuters. The brothers, who own the world's largest meat producer, which has operations in the United States, admitted to paying $150 million, mostly in bribes, to nearly 2,000 politicians in Brazil, including its past three presidents, said the Wall Street Journal.

Brazil's environmental regulator says that meatpacking giant JBS "for years knowingly bought cattle that were raised on illegally deforested land," says Reuters. JBS denied the allegation, which comes at the same time the Brazilian meat industry is reeling from a meat-inspection scandal.

The largest meatpacker in the world, JBS, has suspended operations at 33 of its 36 plants in Brazil "amid the corruption scandal that has caused some of the country's biggest export markets to ban Brazilian meats," said Reuters. A police investigation says meat inspectors accepted bribes to allow sales of low-quality meat, or did not inspect plants at all; the Agriculture Ministry says only a couple of dozen plants were targeted.

Brazil is the world's largest red meat and poultry exporter, but it is losing customers in a scandal over allegations that meatpackers have sold unsafe products for years, said the BBC. Four markets — China, the EU, South Korea and Chile — that account for nearly one-third of meat exports "have now announced restrictions on Brazilian meat."

Pilgrim's Pride, a subsidiary of Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS, will expand its organic and antibiotic-free chicken production capacity by buying GNP Co. for $350 million in cash, said the Denver Post. GNP, based in St. Cloud, Minn, produces organic and antibiotic-free chicken. Pilgram's Price is the second-largest U.S. poultry processor.

The fines for safety lapses are so low that meatpacking companies have little incentive to improve working conditions, says a story by Harvest Public Media on NPR. When Ralph Horner, an employee at JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beef facility was caught on a conveyer built and chocked to death, JBS paid just $38,500 in fines. And that was more than most cases, according to Herb Gibson, director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Denver office, which sends inspectors to the massive Greeley plant. Every day, the plant’s 3,000 employees process roughly 5,600 head of cattle.

Senate Judiciary chairman Charles Grassley asked the Justice Department for an antitrust review of an agreement for JBS, the giant Brazilian meatpacker, to buy the pork operations of agribusiness rival Cargill for $1.45 billion.

The giant Brazilian meatpacker JBS, a relative newcomer to North America, will buy the pork operations of agribusiness rival Cargill for $1.45 billion, the companies announced.