For a long time, I have been buying very good and very cheap meat in a butcher’s shop near my house. I know that they bring it from Nicaragua. And yes, someone had told me that, that they are deforesting there to make pastures, but what are they going to do? One cannot solve Nicaragua’s problems either.”
This was told to me by a friend a few weeks ago, after commenting on a news story about meat that could be arriving in Costa Rica from illegal cattle farms within the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, in Nicaragua.
Forests cut down to open pastures. Invaded indigenous territories. Networks linked to drug trafficking. All to produce meat that, after passing through several intermediaries, ends up turned into a perceptively unholy package on the refrigerated tray of a butcher’s shop where, according to my interlocutor, it is also treated wonderfully.
Between one thing and the other, there are hundreds of kilometers. And also, a story that, little by little, disappeared.
The investigation Carne en conflicto, published by the Patrullaje campaign with the support of Re:wild, documents how consumers and companies can end up linked – unknowingly – to the destruction of some of the most important ecosystems in Central America.
The explanation is precisely in the way. Between the forest and the refrigerated tray there are so many steps that the story ends up blurring. A farm, another farm, an intermediary, a slaughterhouse, a processing plant. Each one receives a product and delivers another. When the meat reaches the consumer, almost no one can tell where it comes from.
This story is not exceptional. It is enough to open any social network for another version of the same phenomenon to appear.
A bathroom organizer for two dollars. A toolkit for less than three dollars. An artificial plant so perfect that it seems to need water.
“Just for today” “Last units” “Free shipping”.
Platforms like Temu have turned compulsive consumption into a near-perfect experience: the algorithm learns what we like before we know it ourselves; the discounts seem unrepeatable; Buy Now. It takes seconds.
Various journalistic investigations have also pointed out the opacity of some of their supply chains, the environmental impacts of ultra-fast production and the risks that certain products are linked to forced labour or poor working conditions.
For centuries, whoever bought knew the producer: He knew who grew the food, made the furniture or raised the animals.
Today, supply chains are so long that it is possible to participate in deforestation, labor exploitation or destruction of ecosystems without having the slightest idea that this is happening.
Perhaps the greatest success of global supply chains has not been transporting products from one continent to another but transporting their stories – and also their consequences – outside our field of vision.
Comprehensive vision. We often talk about responsible consumption as if it were simply about buying organic products, recycling or taking a reusable bag to the supermarket. But responsible consumption is something else.
There is a consumer whose only question is how much it costs. He buys as if he inhabited a world composed only of himself and his immediate needs. And there is another who buys knowing that he never buys alone: behind each object there are people, landscapes, rivers, forests, animals, workers and entire communities that do not appear on the label. Before seeing the price, this consumer wonders: where does it come from? Who did it? What had to happen for it to reach my hands?
You will not always find answers and many times you will discover that there are not even clear answers. That absence also says things.
On the other hand, there are companies that make an effort to know and explain the origin of their products.
My friend was right about one thing: none of us can solve, on our own, Nicaragua’s problems. Nor those of a factory on the other side of the world or those of an Amazon forest. But between solving those problems and convincing ourselves that “the problem is theirs” there is a big difference.
I also suspect that he will buy again in that butcher shop and that they will continue to serve him wonderfully. But I would like to think that next time, in addition to asking how much a good tenderloin costs, he will think about the path he has traveled to reach that tray.