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Short Abstract

dPaP is a citizen science initiative mapping Brazil's beef supply chain and empowering consumers. Active partnership with government has supported data uptake and created new opportunities for impact.

Abstract

The "Do Pasto ao Prato" (dPaP) initiative addresses the lack of transparency in Brazil's cattle sector, a leading driver of deforestation and forced labor in the country. dPaP uses data intelligence to inform consumers through an app about a slaughter company's socio-environmental impacts, sustainability commitments, and sanitary compliance. Each product scan by a user reveals the commercial link between a specific slaughterhouse and a retail store. Today, dPaP has more than 32k scans by 6.6k users in all 27 Brazilian states. We actively support investigative NGOs, journalists, and governments to make sense of these data, holding retailers accountable for the hidden socio-environmental impacts in their supply chains for the first time. For example, our data informs the Brazilian Federal Prosecution Office’s ‘Carne Legal’ program, an initiative that enforces legal compliance across the beef supply chain. To ensure our data was suitable for legal action with retail companies, we co-created a quality assessment framework with prosecutors. This framework tracks general indicators, such as data volume and coverage, and specific indicators for each slaughterhouse-to-retail link. The trust built through active engagement has in turn allowed us to transform data challenges into opportunities: app users identified meat sold without sanitary labels, preventing the input of data in the app. We documented it so the Prosecution Office and civil society were able to pursue legal actions to improve the regulatory framework. Such actions show citizen science empowering the systematic increase of transparency in the retail sector.