- Through its 2021-founded subsidiary MyCarbon, Brazil’s meat processing giant Minerva Foods is emitting and selling carbon credits to big oil companies that are in a rush to move away from a polluting stigma.
- Some credit-obtaining projects, however, face criticism over a lack of transparency and procedural perils. The controversies include unfulfilled promises to restore degraded ecosystems, such as the biodiverse Cerrado pasturelands, and halt deforestation within Amazon areas.
- The case raises concerns that the carbon market may be rubber-stamping the maintenance of industrial activities with high ecological impact, without truthfully contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmentally damaging practices.
Since the first scientific critiques of fossil fuels, oil companies have gone from being the “wealth of nations” to “destroyers of the planet.” In financial market terms, they have become environmental liabilities.
It cannot be said, however, that they have also become economic liabilities. The global carbon credit market is heating up — quite like the planet — and oil companies are among the main players interested in leveraging this business.
Among the world’s largest oil producers, countries on the Arabian Peninsula, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have partnered with Brazil’s Minerva Foods. It is the country’s second-largest meatpacker by net revenue, trailing only JBS — a giant firm whose supply chain has been linked to deforestation.
In 2021, Minerva’s subsidiary MyCarbon 3 Ltda was created for a single purpose: to generate and sell carbon credits.
However, the company’s projects are far from transparent. Currently under validation by Verra, the world’s leading carbon credits certifier, these initiatives aim to restore degraded pasturelands in the Cerrado. This biodiverse savanna ecosystem, which comprises around 20% of Brazil’s territory, is home to part of Minerva’s cattle supply chain and has already lost half of its native vegetation. The main cause of deforestation in the Cerrado is the activity that feeds Minerva’s meatpacking plants, farming.
Partnerships between oil companies and carbon credit companies are emerging as a global trend.
In 2022, Shell invested 200 million reais (roughly $40 million) in Carbonext, a developer of REDD+ projects (carbon projects in forests). The oil company’s contribution guarantees preferential access to the carbon credits that Carbonext generates in the Brazilian Amazon, offsetting emissions from fossil fuel businesses. But this partnership tarnishes the multinational, since Carbonext’s projects are being investigated for violating rights against Quilombolas — traditional communities originally formed by runaway enslaved individuals – and Indigenous peoples.
Like MyCarbon and Carbonext, CarbonCo sold carbon credits to Petrobras. Within a few months, the avoided deforestation that the Brazilian oil company advertised as a justification for buying the credits fell apart: The forest has not remained protected since the deal. Petrobras had created the “premium carbon-neutral gasoline” based on carbon credits from the Envira Amazônia project, but deforestation in the so-called offset area has been on the rise since 2017.
“It’s not about selling oil with or without carbon credits. Carbon credits should help offset emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, but it certainly isn’t to be used to prop up the oil industry,” criticizes Shigueo Watanabe, a ClimaInfo researcher with more than 20 years’ experience in the carbon market. He warns that this market is serving an activity that should be reduced to the point of extinction, such as the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Minerva’s subsidiary has two business models, brokering carbon credits from third-party projects and generating its own credits through agricultural and forestry initiatives. According to MyCarbon, the credits sold to companies in the Middle East are part of the first business.
Minerva Foods does not have a deforestation-free supply chain. The company reports that it does not track its indirect suppliers — a commitment it claims it will only meet by 2030. There is no shortage of examples of violations committed by the meatpacker’s indirect suppliers.
Hidden credit generation farms
Two of MyCarbon’s carbon projects adhere to two methodologies from Verra. One is to improve the management of agricultural land, which includes sustainable pasture practices such as the recovery and maintenance of degraded grazing areas. In this case, the project description document must contain information specifying the area of the quantification units, i.e., the single or multiple areas in which the carbon stock or emission reduction actions will be measured.
The other methodology aims to reduce emissions based on the use of ingredients in animal feed, since cattle naturally produce methane — the most harmful greenhouse gas for the climate — as a byproduct of digesting.
The VSC Standard, a guide that standardizes information for agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) projects, requires projects to include geospatial files in their initial submissions. These must define the boundaries of the properties where credits will be generated in order to “facilitate accurate monitoring, reporting and verification” of the proposal.
In the two MyCarbon projects being validated by Verra, however, Minerva’s subsidiary did not follow these rules. Called “Brazilian Regenerative Agriculture for the Cerrado Carbon Credit,” or BRA-3C, the project registered by MyCarbon to start producing credits in January 2024 presents incomplete and confusing information about the location of the areas.
The summary in Verra’s system indicates that the area covers 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres). In the descriptive document, MyCarbon reports that the initial area is 1,193 hectares (2,950 acres), 419 times smaller than the registry figure.
In a third piece of public data, this one geolocated, MyCarbon declared 200 million hectares (494 million acres) for the total area of the project, exactly the perimeter of the Cerrado biome, which corresponds to 21% of Brazil’s territory.
Left: the area indicated by Minerva Foods’ subsidiary for the development of the carbon project. Right: the area of the Cerrado biome. Interactive map by O Joio e O Trigo. Source: Verra and MapBiomas.
In addition, Minerva’s financial audit for 2024 states that the BRA-3C project has 590,000 hectares (around 1.5 million acres) prospected, of which 20,000 (49,000 acres) are already under development.
The investigation spoke to people who usually analyze carbon projects, including experts and journalists who cover the topic. They said that while projects are in the process of being validated, as is the case with MyCarbon, the company can include this information throughout the process. But they also pointed out that transparent projects include these data from the earliest stages of submission.
“When you submit the project, you don’t have to put the whole area, because it’s programmatic, [which means that] every year I can add new areas. But transparency should happen,” says Renato Rodrigues, head of Agribusiness at TerraDot, a Brazilian-American startup that works with a different methodology for carbon projects for agriculture and livestock than the one proposed by Verra, ERW.
Verra allows public comments during a defined review period for submitted projects. One comment submitted in February this year flagged a lack of clarity and missing information across various sections of MyCarbon’s 295-page project document. The investigation tried to contact the author of the comment through Verra, which said that all comments “remain anonymous unless the person who wrote them requests otherwise.”
The comment also criticizes the lack of identification of farmers who, according to MyCarbon, already have a signed contract to participate in the project. They are not listed in the project description as “stakeholders” or “other involved institutions.”
The project is expected to include Tocantins as one of its regions of coverage — a northern Brazilian state that has almost 90% of its territory overlapping the Cerrado area — since MyCarbon has listed the state’s Department of the Environment and Water Resources (Semas-TO) among the stakeholders. The state has been discussing the jurisdictional carbon market, in which projects are developed by the public sector with actions to reduce deforestation and fires, which may or may not involve the private sector.
In response to a Freedom of Information request, Semas-TO said that it had only received a “brief description of the project,” that it was unaware of the area covered and that it had not signed any contracts with MyCarbon. The state of Tocantins also asked who would assume possible reputational risks of the project, to which the company replied that the risks “can be shared between MyCarbon and the rural producer, according to the terms of the partnership contract,” a document Semas-TO said it had never seen.
BRA-3C is also under scrutiny for its additionality — a core requirement for any legitimate carbon project. Additionality means there is proof that, without a given project, no emissions reductions would occur. In this case, it means that the area protected from deforestation goes beyond what is already required by law, such as legal reserves and permanent protection areas.
For the anonymous commenter, the additionality argument “is flimsy,” since MyCarbon does not present an analysis to identify whether farm owners would adopt soil management practices even without the existence of the project.
“Practices such as crop rotation, mulching to avoid exposed soil and efficient water use are already widely adopted in Brazilian agriculture, especially in the Cerrado, where the country’s largest grain producers are located,” he wrote.
The MyCarbon project is expected to generate carbon credits until December 2043. Asked about the lack of information, Verra said that the applicant must take all comments into account before proceeding with the validation process.
Renove ALM Brazil is another of Minerva’s carbon projects, this one in partnership with Biofílica Ambipar, a company that offers decarbonization services. Ambipar’s clients include cigarette producer Philip Morris; airline company Latam; banks such as Itaú, Santander and Banco do Brasil; among others. The crediting period for Renove spans 30 years, from 2023-53, and targets private properties with livestock operations.
MyCarbon and Ambipar say they plan to apply the project across almost 350 million hectares (865 million acres), an area that accounts for 41% of Brazil’s territory.
In this case, unlike BRA-3C, Minerva points out which farms will be part of the project but fails to identify the precise areas.
“If there are 10 properties in the project, it must include the geographical coordinates of all 10,” explains Shigueo Watanabe, from ClimaInfo.
On the contrary, MyCarbon project lists five private rural properties that supply Minerva Foods but omits their exact locations. The absence of this information was also noted by a comment on Verra’s system.
Carbon projects take between one and three years to begin issuing credits. After the public comment phase, a Verra-certified auditing company must assess the project. The applicant has the chance to improve the proposal until it meets the system’s requirements. While this whole process is just beginning, MyCarbon is taking the opportunity to sell other carbon credits that have no connection to the meat industry.
A lucrative union between carbon & the financial market
MyCarbon was born with a guaranteed buyer market. Its main partners for carbon credits are powerful petro-economies in the Middle East, countries that already control the Brazilian meatpacking giant Minerva.
Among those interested in MyCarbon’s product are the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, the PIF, and the Dubai Financial Market, the DFM, which sells carbon credits to companies wishing to neutralize their emissions.
Global leaders in fossil fuel production, these nations show no sign of scaling back their extraction activities. So instead of reducing emissions, they’re placing bets on carbon markets.
Dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of the carbon market,” Brazil is the end of the Eastern carbon credit chain, a hierarchical scheme in which Saudi families are at the top and Minerva — itself family-founded — is at the bottom.
The PIF owns, among dozens of companies, the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (SALIC), a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. As the PIF’s commodities arm, SALIC is Minerva’s majority shareholder.
Having bought part of the company in 2015 and increased its control in the following years, surpassing the voting power of the founders themselves, SALIC is also a shareholder of Minerva’s other meat company, Australian Lamb Company Pty Ltd.
In turn, as a subsidiary of Minerva Foods, MyCarbon satisfies the Saudi public fund, the group’s main shareholder and investor in various sectors, including oil.
In 2022, MyCarbon supplied a significant share of credits sold in a Saudi-run carbon auction, just a year after it began operations.
“In the auction held in October 2022 by the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Fund, the subsidiary was responsible for around 20% of all the credits traded. This was the world’s largest auction of credits in the voluntary market, and the first in the Middle East, selling over 1 million tons of CO2 in audited, certified credits,” said Minerva’s sustainability report for that year. The voluntary market refers to carbon credits sold by companies outside regulatory systems.
The credits trading was organized by the Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC), another PIF subsidiary that has launched a voluntary carbon market trading platform. According to the RVCMC, Saudi Arabia aims to become “one of the largest voluntary carbon markets in the world by 2030.”
The report asked MyCarbon to identify the “audited and certified” projects but received no reply. PIF replied that it had bought carbon credits from Minerva’s subsidiary from renewable energy projects developed in Piauí by Auren Energia and in Argentina by YPF Energia Electrica.
So on one hand, Minerva sells carbon credits through its subsidiary to its own controlling shareholder — credits that go far beyond the meat industry. On the other hand, it promotes credits tied to pasture restoration, which, even if not yet verified, help position the company as “sustainable.”
At the end of the day, everyone profits, says Watanabe, from ClimaInfo. “The Saudi fund barely spends anything. MyCarbon earns from the project. And Minerva benefits, too, because it has meat with a smaller carbon footprint, and it still looks green for reducing emissions.”
The United Arab Emirates also relies on MyCarbon to promote voluntary carbon markets.
The Dubai Financial Market, or DFM, has three carbon credit providers, two from its own country, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority and First Abu Dhabi Bank. The only foreigner is Minerva’s subsidiary. In practice, Dubai’s capital market injects investor funds into carbon projects.
In 2023, the DFM announced the trading of carbon credits that would be provided by MyCarbon.
The track record of the DFM is not sustainable, however. Of its seven pilot projects, three were based in the Brazilian Amazon. Two of these were targeted by Brazil’s Federal Police in Operation Greenwashing (2024), which found evidence of fraud and land-grabbing in the carbon credit certification process. The REDD+ projects, both certified by Verra, were under investigation for timber laundering, a scheme to legalize wood sourced from illegal deforestation, Mongabay revealed.
In June 2024, Verra suspended the issuance of new credits and any ongoing processes linked to the proponent. Even so, the projects remain listed on the DFM platform, which claims to help the UAE reach net zero by 2050.
Two carbon projects in the portfolio of the DFM, of which MyCarbon is a supplier, show signs of laundering illegally harvested timber from Indigenous lands, protected areas and forests where management was not authorized. Print source: DFM website.
Carbon credits are treated as financial assets in the United Arab Emirates, whose market is hungry for offsets from countries like Brazil.
The investigation asked DFM to identify the MyCarbon projects in its portfolio and whether any credits had been sold. As of publication, there was no response.
Banner image: The chimney of an oil refinery complex expels smoke into the sky at sunset. Image by Steve Garvie via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
This article was first published in Portuguese on Jun 6, 2025, at O Joio e O Trigo.
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