Scrambling for Justice: On Cheap Eggs and Environmental Concern
By Tracy Devine Guzmán*
In 2024, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance capitalized on consumer discontent over inflation to make Democratic culpability for the steepening price of food staples a popular theme of their truth-challenged crusade to defeat the Biden administration. Over the months leading up to the election, the cost of a dozen eggs became a major campaign issue across the United States. In his July 19th speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump assured his followers, the country, and the world that that he would lower costs “on day one.” Before taking office on January 20, 2025, he postulated to the press that he had won the election “on groceries,” avowing: “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
Given his steadfast aversion to public health, environmentalism, peer-reviewed research, and conferrable data, President-Elect Trump did not realize, or perhaps didn’t care to know, the degree to which his expedient campaign promises would remain unfulfilled, and are indeed, unfulfillable. Two weeks into his second administration, the failure to deliver cheaper eggs stems not only from the quixotic nature of the executive order to “deliver emergency price relief,” but more perilously, from the president’s indisposition to acknowledge the climate crisis or the well-documented correlation between factory farming and serious illness—of animals, the environment, and people in the U.S. and globally. In 2023, the World Health Organization, from which the Trump cut all U.S. ties and support on his first day in office, found that 60% of infectious disease worldwide originated from human contact with non-human animals—particularly those raised for food, including eggs.
That animal agriculture is detrimental to the health of humans and the environment—in addition to the animals themselves—is old news. With the notable exception of anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s embattled nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, political leaders in Trump’s orbit tend to ignore the abundant evidence of this noxious relationship. Such is the case among Trump’s substantive Brazilian fan base, including former President Jair Bolsonaro and his followers in the agrobusiness lobby. Embracing climate change denial, Covid conspiracies, a penchant for demeaning political opponents (particularly women), and antipathy for the institutions and processes of democratic governance, the two leaders formed a bond of mutual admiration during their overlapping presidencies—a relationship that continues to shape Bolsonaro’s political discourse in the shadow of his 2022 electoral defeat.
Despite his reluctant exit from office in January 2023, when like Trump in 2020, he sought to stymie the peaceful transfer of power to his opponent, Bolsonaro has continued to harness social media and circuits of formal and informal influence to sway his supporters and the broader Brazilian electorate, whose approval of President Lula over his predecessor has slipped notably since he took office. Bolsonaro has indeed characterized Trump’s return to office and the possibility of U.S. sanctions against the Lula administration as a boon to his own political future and that of his sons, both of whom serve in the Brazilian Congress. As in the U.S. (and elsewhere), popular nostalgia for authoritarian leadership in Brazil seems to stem in large part from pocketbook issues … like the rising cost of groceries.
In 2025, key among the empowered population of bolsonaristas are elected officials representing the ruralist block of Brazil’s National Congress, as well as the landowning and industrial interests that support them. These legislators have made it a central focus of their collective efforts since the beginning of the current Lula administration to create legislation and enact policy to tighten their economic and political grip on the country at the expense of vulnerable populations and ecosystems. Much of their effort has coalesced around the so-called Time-Frame Thesis, or marco temporal, which situates Indigenous peoples perpetually in the crosshairs of bolsonarismo despite the fact that Bolsonaro is disallowed to run for office for another five years. This ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples, including the state’s ongoing inability to enforce their differentiated citizenship rights as enshrined in the 1988 Constitution, has an important connection to Trump’s cheap eggs and the myriad forms of immediate and slow violence that make them possible.
The Time Frame Thesis is a legal doctrine restricting Indigenous land claims to areas inhabited or under judicial review as of October 5, 1988, the date Brazil’s post-dictatorship constitution was promulgated. While political and judicial debate over the doctrine has been ongoing for decades, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in September 2023. The ruralist-oriented Congress responded in turn by passing Law 14.701, which Lula promptly vetoed. Congress overrode the veto, thus entrenching necropolitical governance by prioritizing the interests of agroindustry and political elites over Indigenous and ecological wellbeing. For the past year, Indigenous leaders, chief among them the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas (APIB), have sought tirelessly to challenge the constitutionality of the marco temporal through national and international advocacy, as well as through grassroots mobilization. They have argued, in brief, that the law perpetuates genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide, choosing to step away from policy conciliation efforts orchestrated by Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes in August 2024 with the argument that Indigenous rights are non-negotiable.
While these legal battles stumble along, agrobusiness continues to reap the benefits of the marco temporal legislation—as well as the confusion provoked by the legislation—which has empowered the land invaders who supply major livestock producers to insert or consolidate their influence on Indigenous and other protected areas. Brazil’s JBS, for example, the largest beef producer in the world, which markets to over 150 countries, including major retailers in the United States, has long been criticized for sourcing animals from illegally deforested lands—accusations the company has sometimes denied. Greenpeace began reporting on the practice over fifteen years ago, and IBAMA has fined the company over 7.5 million dollars since 2017.
In October 2024, JBS was also among nearly two-dozen meatpacking companies fined by IBAMA for illegal “cattle laundering,” though the company denies the charges. That JBS has been embroiled in a long list of legal scandals, including corruption, bribery, antitrust allegations, greenwashing, child labor, and animal cruelty, in addition to environmental harm and workers’ rights violations, casts a bit of doubt on said denial. In 2024, New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit against JBS USA, alleging the company made misleading marketing claims that deceived consumers about the sustainability of their operations and products.
As the Trump administration has yet to deliver on its promise to curb inflation despite its eagerness to leave the Paris Agreement, roll back the Green New Deal, and otherwise “eliminate harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies driving up the costs of food and fuel,” Indigenous peoples, laborers, animals, and the environment implicated in food production rest in the balance.
In the context of resurging Trumpism and its political culture of impunity, JBS has capitalized on the U.S. “egg crisis” to enter the egg business in January 2025 with its eye on U.S. markets, having acquired a 50% stake in Mantiqueira Brasil. As the largest egg producer in South America, Mantiqueira has built a brand that prioritizes “innovation and sustainability.” And yet, the combination of surging demand, JBS’s track record of questionable business practices, the lingering power of bolsonarismo and the marco temporal, and the Trump administration’s disregard for public health and the environment could give pause to consumers who care about any of these issues. As the new egg partnership moves forward in Brazil, and the avian flu rages on in the U.S., buyers might take care to consider the ethical costs of their purchases, as well as their pocketbook costs.
Animal agriculture will of course never be good for the animals—a topic that rests outside the scope of this paper. But it could potentially be less environmentally devastating, less detrimental to Indigenous peoples and lands, less corrupt, and less cruel if more lawmakers, policymakers, and consumers worldwide question the sourcing of their purchases and hold companies like JBS, Mantiqueira, and other producers to account. The European Union Deforestation Regulation, which is currently scheduled to go into effect at the end of 2025, is one small but meaningful step in this direction and merits emulation in the U.S., Brazil, and around the world.
Empty political promises notwithstanding, there will be no cheap eggs—only the costs we are willing to bear.
*Tracy Devine Guzmán is associate professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami.
This article was written for issue 153 of the WBO newsletter, dated February 07, 2025. To subscribe and receive free weekly news and analysis like this, simply enter your email in the field provided.
