- Illegal cattle ranching has torn through Nicaragua’s rainforests in recent years, supplying a growing international market for meat despite calls for better oversight of the industry.
- The practice has led to a spike in cases of New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax), a parasitic fly that feeds on warm-blooded animals
- A new investigation by conservation group Re:wild found that years of industry reforms still haven’t prevented cattle ranchers from deforesting protected areas and Indigenous territories.
Illegal cattle ranching has torn through Nicaragua’s rainforests in recent years, supplying a growing international market for meat despite calls for better oversight of the industry. Now, the country is feeling the consequences, as disease spreads through the unchecked movement of livestock.
Cases of New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax), or NWS, a fly that feeds on warm-blooded animals, have exploded across the country. Experts have traced the outbreak to Nicaragua’s massive cattle ranching industry, which transports herds from grazeland to slaughterhouses without always following protocol.
“Nicaraguan beef sold in the United States, Mexico and other global markets is fueling the destruction of the largest remaining tracts of rainforest in the country,” said a new report from environmental group Re:wild. “[It’s] facing one of the most aggressive outbreaks of [NWS] in its recent history.”
Beef is one of Nicaragua’s top exports, and has continued to grow since President Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007. Between January 2024 and June 2025, the country exported more than 60 million kilograms (132 million pounds) of beef to the U.S., valued at more than $390 million, according to U.S. maritime import data obtained by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
Cattle ranching helped exacerbate the spread of NWS, a parasite that first appeared in Panama in 2023 before reaching other parts of Central America and Mexico. Reported cases in Nicaragua rose from 11,930 at the start of 2025 to 19,700 in early July, according to the country’s Institute for Agricultural Protection and Health.
In that time, the outbreak has spread across 17 departments, infecting more than 13,000 cattle, thousands of farm animals and wildlife, as well as 125 humans, according to government figures.
The flies lay eggs in the mouths, ears and wounds of cattle and other livestock. Routine health checks are meant to monitor them, but Nicaragua largely fails to carry these out, according to the Re:wild report.
“Despite intensified local control efforts, regional agencies have raised concerns about the Nicaraguan government’s limited coordination, lack of transparency, and barriers to implementing effective public health campaigns — conditions that are fueling the pest’s rapid spread,” it said.
To monitor the cattle ranching industry, Nicaragua implemented a national traceability system in 2006, with a $10 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank. It requires ranchers to use livestock branding, sale letters and transportation permits to create a history of where each animal was raised.
In 2020, the industry also pledged to prevent livestock from being raised in protected areas, and to establish communication networks between Indigenous communities, the government and other stakeholders.
Last year, officials added electronic ear tags and new penalties for falsifying documents to the traceability system.
More than 125,220 farmers were registered in the traceability system as of 2021, with approximately 4.7 million head of cattle counted by the Chamber of Bovine Meat Export Plants.
However, critics point to widespread deforestation as evidence that industry controls still aren’t working. Last year, the country had the world’s highest percentage of primary forest loss, losing around 94,800 hectares (234,300 acres), an overwhelming majority of it traced to illegal cattle ranching on Indigenous land and protected areas, according to an analysis by the World Resources Institute.
Re:wild counted 86 locations around the Mayangna Sauni Bas Indigenous territory, located on the northern Caribbean coast, where corrals, auction sites and control ports accept cattle that were raised in protected areas or other deforested land.
In the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, near the Costan Rican border, ranchers raise cattle in the buffer zone and transfer them to other corrals so they can be registered on legal farms, the Re:wild investigation found. The ranchers have destroyed Indigenous land, with many residents facing food insecurity.
“Our community members are prisoners in their own communities,” Becky Mccray Urbina, legal adviser for the Rama and Kriol Indigenous communities in the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, told Mongabay. “We always describe it like that … because we don’t have access to our natural resources. We don’t have access to our lands. We don’t have access to hunt, to fish, to live as we culturally lived within our territory.”
Seven companies manage around 95% of the country’s slaughterhouses: Nuevo Carnic, Industrial Comercial San Martin, Matadero Central, Novaterra, Nica Beef Packers, Ganaderia Integral De Nicaragua and Industrias Carnicas Integradas. The companies work with several meat processors in the U.S. that supply major companies in the country, according to an EIA analysis of market dynamics.
The meat suppliers didn’t respond to a request for comment or couldn’t be reached.
“As the largest buyer of beef from Nicaragua, the US has a responsibility to ensure the burgers on Americans’ grills were not produced through illegal deforestation, which is harming both the Indigenous peoples whose land is being invaded and law-abiding U.S. ranchers who have to compete with illegally produced beef,” Rick Jacobsen, EIA senior manager for commodity policy, told Mongabay in an email.
He urged the US to reintroduce and pass the FOREST Act, which would make it illegal to import commodities like beef, palm oil, soybeans, cocoa and rubber when sourced from deforested land.
A version of the bill was introduced in 2021 but failed to advance. Another version, introduced in 2023, is still under consideration.
In its report, Re:wild said Nicaraguan suppliers should make similar improvements by establishing full traceability systems that track cattle back to their birth farms. It recommended implementing a land registration process for rural properties, mandating the use of geographical information system mapping to prevent illegal land grabs.
It also called on the Ortega government to dismantle illegal farms within protected areas and Indigenous territories.
“By adopting these recommendations, stakeholders at all levels can help address the systemic issues in the Nicaraguan beef industry, reduce deforestation, uphold human rights, and ensure a future for the country’s tropical rainforests and Indigenous and afro-descendant communities,” it said.
Banner image: An illegal farm in the core area of the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve. Image courtesy of Camilo de Castro Belli/Patrol Campaign.
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