Industrial Ag And State Governors Pushing For Loophole To Gut Brazil's Deforestation Moratorium
One of the cornerstones of Amazon rainforest protection – the Soy Moratorium – is under unprecedented pressure from Brazilian agribusiness organisations, politicians, and global trading companies, the Guardian has learned. Soy is one of the most widely grown crops in Brazil, and posed a huge deforestation threat to the Amazon rainforest until stakeholders voluntarily agreed to impose a moratorium and no longer source it from the region in 2006.
The voluntary agreement brought together farmers, environmentalists and international food companies such as Cargill and McDonald’s, and decided that any detection of soy planted on areas deforested after 2008 would result in the farm being blocked from supply chains, regardless of whether the land clearance was legal in Brazil. In the 18 years since, the moratorium has been hailed as a conservation success story that improved the reputation of global brands, enabled soy production to expand significantly without Amazon destruction and prevented an estimated 17,000 square kilometres of deforestation.
But next week the main soybean body – the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) – will ballot its members about a reform that conservation groups say would gut its effectiveness and embarrass the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of next year’s COP30 climate conference in Belém. The association is proposing a change in the way the moratorium is monitored. Instead of assessing an entire farm, it breaks down the analysis to the level of individual fields, which would allow growers to pick and choose which areas of their land are in compliance.
But conservation groups warn this reform would create a huge loophole and they have threatened to withdraw from the moratorium if it goes ahead. “The question this raises is why the leadership of ABIOVE is pressing ahead with this vote, when it appears to undermine the commitments of its member companies,” said David Cleary, global director for agriculture in the Nature Conservancy. ‘The proposed changes to shift to a sub-farm level monitoring system make it possible for farmers to sell to moratorium companies from one part of the farm and non-moratorium companies from another. The monitoring of the moratorium has worked well since 2008. If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/03/exclusive-protection-deal-for-amazon-rainforest-in-peril-as-big-business-turns-up-heat