"The Rise of the Global Beef Complex: Strategy, Structure, and the Global Climate Crisis"

Business historians have produced wide-ranging insights into the transformations of the meatpacking industry since the early 19th century, yet there has been almost no exploration of the radical shifts in the industry since the turn of the 21st century. This paper situates the contemporary global beef complex in what John McNeill and Peter Engelke have termed The Great Acceleration. The period since 1945 has witnessed a profound, rapid, and—in a world-historic sense—anomalous increase in fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, and quantities of nitrogen synthesized. For the meat industry, the great acceleration entailed a host of changes centering on the intensification of animal production on one hand, and on the other hand, the intensification of production of animal feedstuffs. Using a case study of the Brazilian-based multinational agribusiness JBS (currently the world’s largest meatpacker), this paper will consider how governments and businesses strategically responded to the Great Acceleration in ways that have produced a structural “inertia” in the industry, limiting the power of individual firms to address the greenhouse gas emissions associated with modern meat.