At the FrigoAmazonas slaughter house inside the world’s largest rainforest, the owner doesn’t mince his words – much of the cattle processed here comes from illegally deforested land.

“It’s impossible to buy cows from land that isn’t deforested,” Felipe Oliveira told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in his tatty office at the abattoir in Brazil’s Amazonas State.

“Everyone here deforests… if they don’t, it’s impossible for a family to live,” the slaughterhouse boss said, sitting beneath exposed electrical wires hanging from the ceiling.

Shady slaughterhouses, ‘cow laundering’ drive spike in Amazon deforestation