By Stefanie Eschenbacher
SANTAREM, Brazil (Reuters) -Brazilian soy farmers are pushing further into the Amazon rainforest to plant more of their crops, putting pressure on a landmark deal signed two decades ago aimed at slowing deforestation.
Many are taking advantage of a loophole in the Amazon Soy Moratorium, a voluntary agreement signed by the world’s top grain traders in 2006 that they would not buy soy grown on land deforested after 2008.
The Moratorium protects old-growth rainforest that has never before been cleared, but excludes many other kinds of vegetation and forests that have regrown on previously cleared land, known as secondary forests.
While this land is also important for preserving the fragile Amazon biome, farmers can raze it and plant soy without violating the terms of the Moratorium and could even market it as deforestation-free.
The most recent official annual report on the Moratorium, which covers the crop year 2022-2023, showed that soy planted on virgin forest has almost tripled between 2018 and 2023 to reach 250,000 hectares, or 3.4% of all soy in the Amazon.
Its study area is limited to municipalities that grow over 5,000 hectares of soy.
However, Xiaopeng Song, a professor at the geographical sciences department of the University of Maryland who has tracked the expansion of soy over the past two decades, found more than four times that forest loss.
Satellite data he analyzed exclusively for Reuters shows 16% of Brazilian Amazon land under production for soy, or about 1.04 million hectares, is planted where trees have been cleared since 2008, the cutoff date agreed in the Moratorium.
“I would like to see secondary forest and recovered forest included in the Moratorium,” said Song. “It creates loopholes if we only limit it to primary forest.”
Abiove, the soy industry body overseeing the Moratorium, said in a statement that the agreement aims to rein in deforestation of old-growth forests while other methodologies have broader criteria that could lead to “inflated interpretations.”
Reuters was unable to make a detailed comparison because Abiove declined to share granular data.
Data in the Moratorium report comes from Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, and its assessments are recognized internationally and monitored independently.
Abiove said it was aware that some soy was planted in areas where regrown forests had been cut.
The discrepancy over how to define a forest has huge implications for conservation.
Deforestation, drought and heat driven by climate change bring the rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it starts an irreversible transformation into a savannah.
Most scientists are calling not only for a halt to all deforestation but also for increased efforts to reforest.
Viola Heinrich, a post-doctoral researcher at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, who has extensively studied secondary forests in the Amazon, said these were “crucial” in limiting global warming even if initially less biodiverse.
“We cannot achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement without actively increasing the carbon sink,” she said, referring to regenerating ecosystems that rapidly absorb and store carbon.
Secondary forests absorb carbon at a faster rate than old-growth forests, but store less of it.
‘STOLEN AGAIN’
On a scorching afternoon late last year, on the outskirts of Santarem, a port city by the Amazon River, farmers were in the last stages of clearing land. Felled trees were neatly stacked up in rows, ready to be burnt.
Some of these trees were around three decades old, part of a secondary forest on land that was once razed to make way for cattle but later abandoned, satellite images showed.
“What can be stolen once, can be stolen again,” said Gilson Rego, of the Pastoral Land Commission, a church-affiliated group working with locals affected by deforestation, as he pointed to surrounding areas where soy had been planted.
In the last five years, Rego saw the area dedicated to the crop soar.
More than a dozen soy and subsistence farmers who spoke to Reuters said the main draw was the nearby Cargill terminal from where soy is shipped worldwide because it reduces costs for logistics. Cargill did not respond to requests for comment.
The boom helped Brazil overtake the United States in 2020 as the world’s largest soy exporter.
About two thirds of it ships to China, whose largest buyer, Cofco, has signed up to the Moratorium and said earlier this year that it was committed to it. Nearly all of it is used to fatten animals for meat production.
Still, Song estimated an additional 6 million hectares of the rainforest would have been lost to soy in Brazil without the Moratorium and related conservation efforts, considering the pace of expansion elsewhere. Neighboring Bolivia, he said, had become a deforestation hot spot.
Brazilian farmers have always opposed the Moratorium and complained that even a small amount of deforestation can lead traders to block purchases from entire farms, a policy that Abiove is considering changing.
Thousands of properties that cover some 10% of soy’s footprint in the region are currently blocked.
Adelino Avelino Noimann, the vice president of the soy farmers association in Para state, where Santarem is located, said the soy boom was creating opportunities in a poor country.
“It’s not fair that other countries in Europe could deforest and grow, and now we are held back by laws that are not even ours,” said Noimann.
LEGAL ATTACKS
Farming groups allied with right-wing politicians, once a fringe movement, have launched lawsuits and legislative attacks on the Moratorium in the capital Brasilia, and half a dozen major agricultural states, seeking to weaken its provisions.
At the end of April, a justice from Brazil’s Supreme Court said it would allow the country’s biggest farming state, Mato Grosso, to withdraw tax incentives from signatories of the Moratorium.
The ruling still needs to be confirmed by the full court.
Andre Nassar, the president of Abiove, the soy industry body that oversees the Moratorium, has already hinted that it could weaken rules to appease farmers.
“The solution is not ending the Moratorium or keeping it as it is,” Nassar told senators in April. “Something needs to be done.”
Global traders including ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Cofco and Louis Dreyfus Company had all signed up back in 2006.
Abiove and the grain traders it represents have declined to publicly discuss details but environmental group Greenpeace, which is part of some discussions, said last year that behind closed doors there was a push from traders to weaken it.
Environmentalists like Andre Guimaraes, an executive director at IPAM, another nonprofit that monitors the agreement, said that even with its faults it was important.
“We still see the expansion of soy in the Amazon,” he said. “But it could be worse.” Other environmentalists said it should be reinforced by closing loopholes.
Abundant water and nutrient-rich soil are the main reasons farmers from other parts of the country, including the soy heartland Mato Grosso, have moved to Para.
“Here, we can have as many as three harvests,” said Edno Valmor Cortezia, the president of the local farmers union, adding that farmers there can grow soy, corn and wheat on the same plot in a single year.
In the municipality Belterra near Santarem, soy expansion stopped short only at a local cemetery and school.
Raimundo Edilberto Sousa Freitas, the principal, showed Reuters court records and supporting evidence for two instances when 80 children and teachers had symptoms of pesticide intoxication last year.
One farmer was later fined, the records showed, but the crop continues to claim more of the area every year.
Occasionally, a few imposing trees that are protected by law are left in sprawling fields of soy, the last reminder of the lush biome that was once there.
(Reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher in Santarem, Brazil; additional reporting by Ana Mano in Sao Paulo; editing by Manuela Andreoni, Brad Haynes and Claudia Parsons)
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