Nigerian Activists Push Back on JBS and Government Slaughterhouse Plans

Nigerian activists are mobilizing to stop the construction of six slaughterhouses planned by JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company. In late 2024, the multinational corporation signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Nigerian government to invest in the facilities, citing efforts to address food insecurity in the country. If built, these would be the first JBS processing plants in Africa.

The decision has drawn criticism from environmental advocates, including Mariann Bassey-Olsson, who leads the nonprofit Environmental Rights Action, the Nigerian chapter of Friends of the Earth. She argues that the slaughterhouses are at odds with what’s best for Nigerians, and the social and environmental impacts of the proposed operations are alarming. “It’s a whole lot of issues for us that we are still grappling with,” she tells Sentient. “We don’t have the answers. We don’t know what these people are doing.”

The agreement highlights a growing imbalance in the global food system. New research published in September 2025 reveals that although the Global South — emerging and developing countries — produces an increasing share of the world’s food, most of the food and profits flow to the Global North. In 1995, the Global South produced 50% of the world’s food, but by 2020 was producing 80%, the study found.

“Countries like India and China and the rest of the Global South, Africa,” says Meghna Goyal, the lead author on the new study, “earn very little income from these sectors, even though they produce a majority of the world’s agriculture.”

JBS’s Environmental and Social Track Record

JBS is a Brazilian-founded multinational meat-processing corporation. Of the six processing plants planned for Nigeria, three will be for poultry, two for beef and one for pork.

JBS has been criticized repeatedly for its environmental and social impacts. Despite the company’s pledge to produce deforestation-free beef, a recent investigation by the Greenpeace publication Unearthed reports that ranchers in Brazil say the goal is impossible to accomplish. Since announcing the pledge, the meat producer has been linked to sourcing cattle from a Brazilian farm penalized for the illegal deforestation of the Amazon rainforest — a major driver of global climate change.

In addition to its environmental impacts, JBS has faced scrutiny over the treatment of its slaughterhouse workers. Despite the relatively high pay, workers report dehumanizing and mentally taxing work.

“JBS could be different, but there’s every chance that it’s really about the same thing,” Joyce Brown, Director of Programmes for Health of Mother Earth Foundation, a nonprofit focused on food sovereignty in Nigeria, tells Sentient. “The community suffers the impact from, you know, environmental pollution, the uptake of land, and every other impact it will feel.”

Brown is hesitant to believe the company’s claims that the food produced will be kept within communities instead of being exported.

Bassey-Olsson’s concerns go beyond Nigeria. She worries that if the processing plants are constructed in Nigeria, JBS will broaden its expansion to other countries in Africa. “Nigeria is considered like a big brother in the subregion with 200 million people,” she says. “They did their homework and know that if Nigeria is on board, it will be easy to go into the subregions.”

In Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria has the second-largest economy after South Africa, and it has the largest population, outpacing Ethiopia by 100 million people.

“If you have Nigeria, you have like a critical mass of Africa,” says Bassey-Olsson.

JBS did not respond to a request for comment from Sentient on the advocates’ concerns.

Sustainable Development or Inequitable Agribusiness?

JBS plans to build the six slaughterhouses throughout the country, including in the states of Lagos, Kano and Ogun. Bassey-Olsson tells Sentient that she learned about these locations while meeting with government officials. To date, Ogun is the only publicly announced site as the state’s governor shared on Instagram earlier this year. The social media post promises that the Ogun government is “committed to creating an enabling environment for investments that will accelerate sustainable development and prosperity.”

Earlier research suggests that increasing agricultural production in the Global South can create “opportunities for farmers to produce more and better for the global market, they get better prices, and developing countries are able to expand to other sectors and earn more,” says Goyal. Her team analyzed datasets that track how money and products move across the global food system and demonstrated that most profits are generated during processing after the livestock or products leave the farm.

The steps in the supply chain that occur after the slaughterhouse — such as additional processing (into final products), transportation, retail and wholesale trade — generate significant value. If the products are exported, that value would likely enrich the Global North.

In Brazil, JBS works with contract farmers who bear all the risks of raising chickens and pigs. That model has allowed JBS to grow exponentially while farmers pay the price. This year, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and shifted its business to the Netherlands, a tax haven for multinational corporations.

A Meat Market at Odds With Tradition

According to a JBS announcement of the MOU agreement with Nigeria, the company’s goal is to address food insecurity in the country. The World Food Programme reports that 30.6 million people in Nigeria are experiencing life-threatening food insecurity. “Expanding local production has the potential not only to improve food security but also to significantly reduce imports, generate local jobs, and support millions of small-scale farmers,” reads the statement.

That intention runs counter to Nigerian cultural norms, Bassey-Olsson says. “Most African societies eat meat in a sustainable manner,” she tells Sentient. That means eating less meat and using it quickly when an animal is slaughtered, rather than storing it or selling it on a large scale. The vast majority of agricultural producers in Nigeria are smallholder farms, not the factory farms common in the United States. “Traditionally and historically, we don’t have animals put in cages, or where they are put in very inhumane conditions,” Bassey-Olsson tells Sentient. “We don’t support that.”

Nigerians see tending to their land and animals as an act of stewardship rather than extraction, unlike the modern industrial producers in the United States and elsewhere, Bassey-Olsson tells Sentient. “In Africa, land means a lot to us. People die for their lands,” she says, adding that farmers in the North view animals as their family.

Building Community Power

Bassey-Olsson doesn’t expect to receive a copy of the MOU between Nigeria and JBS, even though she submitted a public records request. “Coming from my experience, we always ask for things,” she tells Sentient, but “we don’t get it.” Sentient has independently submitted a public records request for the MOU and has yet to hear back from the Nigerian government.

The community doesn’t know what’s happening or what the implications of JBS launching its operations could be, and that’s a big part of the problem, Bassey-Olsson tells Sentient. According to her, there were a couple of news articles about the MOU when it was first signed, but the move hasn’t received the attention it deserves. “Most people are not even aware of what is going on. I saw it in the papers firstly, and I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t take much notice of it,” she says.

The lack of media and public attention is something Bassey-Olson is working hard to change.

Environmental Rights Action, led by Bassey-Olsson, is working with other local organizations, including Health of Mother Earth Foundation, to educate their communities about the likely social and environmental implications of the JBS meat-processing plants.

“We are doing everything — workshops, sensitization campaigns, advocacy, visits, interviews, some of us are writing in the papers,” she says.