Farmers unable to produce prescriptions for hormones, the revelation that hormone-treated beef was shipped into the EU and news that an entire inspection body had to be struck off for failing to notice on-farm breaches of livestock rules.

These were among the issues that greeted two European Commission auditors when they arrived in Brazil last October to check the country was abiding by the plan it pledged to follow to comply with EU food safety rules.

The auditors were following up on an EU audit that took place the previous year that found failures in Brazil’s food safety controls – the guarantee that Brazilian beef landing in EU ports was hormone-free had been entirely based on sworn statements that could not be verified by authorities.

They were to check how the Brazilian department of agriculture, livestock and food supply – abbreviated in Portuguese to MAPA – were progressing with the measures it agreed to implement on foot of the 2024 findings.

Central to these measures was a new “protocol for export of female bovines” that was to bring traceability to the use of growth-promoting hormones in Brazilian cattle farming.

This was supposed to involve a MAPA inspection of a farm looking to gain export eligibility before it was deemed to comply with the new protocol.

A timeline compiled by the auditors in their final report on the trip appears to tell a different story.

Timeline

  • 16 January 2025: A protocol is ratified by MAPA that the department sees as meeting EU requirements on traceability.
  • 21 January 2025: MAPA says that the only beef to be exported to the EU is that from female cattle which have not been treated with hormones banned in the EU. Male cattle remain eligible for EU export as they are not treated with oestradiol 17ß.
  • 13 February 2025: MAPA imposes a complete suspension of exports of beef from female cattle to the EU. It states that these shipments will only resume once the new protocol is implemented in full – the provisional timeframe for doing so is one year.
  • February 2025: MAPA says that the new protocol has become “fully operational”.
  • 15 July 2025: MAPA conducts its first on-farm protocol compliance check. This is four and a half months after it had said the protocol became fully operational. Some 290 health certificates for consignments of beef from female cattle had been authorised over this window.
  • 14 October 2025: MAPA informs the EU auditors that it resumed the export of beef from female cattle on 3 April as the protocol had “full operational status” in Brazil’s eyes. The Brazilian authorities had not notified the Commission of the move.
  • October 2025: The audit team visited five of the 150 farms that had by then been enrolled in the protocol system. Of these five farms, three declared that they use oestradiol 17ß. While treatment records were produced, no prescriptions for the hormone could be produced by the farmers.

    • The lack of prescription documentation was a breach of Brazil’s pledge to the Commission one year previous and the discrepancy had not been noted by either the certifying entity nor MAPA.

    What the Brazilians themselves uncovered

    The Commission’s audit report details various non-compliances that MAPA found when double-checking the on-the-ground inspections of certifying authorities.

    MAPA said that it had supervised the Brazilian auditors carrying out the protocol checks and that officials found “deficiencies” with these inspections twice that had not picked up by inspectors.

    One of Brazil's recognised certification bodies was struck off after department officials found that they failed to flag inspection issues. \ Philip Doyle

    As a result, one audit entity had its inspection certification struck off, with all of the farms it had audited having their certification suspended.

    In the second case, the certifying authority was told to take corrective action by MAPA, but not told what actions were actually necessary to correct the situation.

    Farm visit leads to EU-wide recall

    One of the five farms visited by the EU auditors had declared that it used the hormone oestradiol 17ß on 179 female cattle in autumn 2024, making the beef from these cattle ineligible for export to the EU.

    However, the Brazilian body responsible for certifying cattle as eligible for export to the EU issued certificates for 174 of these cattle for EU-eligible slaughter in May and July 2025.

    250 export licenses were issued for Brazilian beef from female cattle before the first MAPA on-farm check took place. \ Philip Doyle

    The Commission auditors reported that this was “due to an administrative mistake by the farm” and that the export certifying body had not checked the original treatment records.

    This was identified by the EU inspectors as a breach of the legal requirements in place on the functioning of the segregated production system.

    The auditors also said that “no attempts had nevertheless been made by MAPA to trace the products from the 174 animals concerned”.

    This was identified by the EU inspectors as a breach of multiple legal requirements.