1 Paper presented at 7 th International Critical Management Studies (CMS) Conference Naples, Italy July 11-13 Stream 16- Encountering Sustainability: Development, Capital and Alternative Futures Deforestation and Slave Labour in the Amazon: contesting the sustainability of the cattle industry Authors: Sylmara Lopes Francelino-Gonçalves-Dias, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo: PUC-SP sylmaraldias@gmail.com Patricia Mendonça, Centro Universitário FEI and Fundação Getúlio Vargas – SP pmendonca@fei.edu.br Introduction This paper seeks to analyse the limits of and possibilities for resistance at local and international level in the mobilization against slave labour in the cattle industry chain in Brazil. Recent developments in understanding international business from a Neo-Gramscian perspective (Levy, 2003, 2008; Levy & Newell, 2005) have contributed to an understanding of global production networks (GPN) as fields of contestation and collaboration that engage businesses, states and social actors. A commodity chain is structured around sets of inter- organizational networks and is maintained not only through economic market exchanges, but also through processes of legitimation and consent, which Gramsci (2001) calls hegemony. The Brazilian commercial cattle herd is understood to be the largest in the world, with about 184.9 million head. Much of the meat chain is still organised through the informal economy, primarily via extensive cattle farming, and lacks a public system of information and production tracking which would guarantee origin and compliance with legislation and social and environmental practices (Araujo & Bueno, 2008). Many of these, often illegal, informal activities are embedded in legalized networks of production and supply. In Brazil there is great heterogeneity in the set of agents participating in the cattle chain up to the point where raw products are exported: including both ranchers and small scale farmers; large cattle companies that comply with high standards; and illegal slaughterhouses that do not undergo any form of regulation (Buaianin & Batalha, 2007). The expansion of the cattle industry occurs at the outer limits of the Amazon rainforest and is today the largest contributor to deforestation. Many ranches are located on illegally occupied land, so called “grilagens” (land grabs), which are hard to access – sometimes hidden in the