{"id":239212,"date":"2026-01-18T05:56:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T05:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/239212\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T05:56:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T05:56:21","slug":"a-major-agreement-to-protect-the-amazon-is-falling-apart-after-20-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/239212\/","title":{"rendered":"A major agreement to protect the Amazon is falling apart after 20 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly 20 years ago, a Brazilian lobbying group for soy trading and processing companies signed onto a historic conservation deal known as the Amazon soy moratorium. The voluntary agreement prohibits members from buying soybeans grown on lands deforested after July 2008. Proponents of the deal say that it has been highly effective at\u00a0protecting forest land without impeding soy production over the last two decades. Under the moratorium, growing soy on other lands \u2014\u00a0like those cleared before 2008, or pasture or savannah lands \u2014 is still fair game, and reports indicate that production on such lands in the Amazon has quadrupled<\/a> since 2006. Now, amid changing political headwinds, the deforestation agreement is in danger.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On January 1, a new law eliminating the tax benefits for members of the moratorium took effect in Mato Grosso, the Brazilian state that produces the most soybeans in the country. These tax benefits functioned\u00a0separately from the moratorium; nevertheless, following the new law, the lobbying group for soy traders \u2014 including multinational firms like Cargill, Bunge, ADM, and others \u2014\u00a0announced its plan to leave the moratorium, which experts say will put more of the Amazon rainforest at risk of deforestation. Without participation from these major corporations, the agreement risks becoming largely toothless \u2014 and exacerbating growing challenges faced by agricultural producers today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The exodus of agrifood groups from the moratorium is \u201centirely self-defeating,\u201d said Glenn Hurowitz, founder of Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy group focused on conservation. For 20 years, \u201cthese companies\u2019 commercial success has relied on the soy moratorium,\u201d argued Hurowitz. \u201cGutting it is probably going to create a lot of marketing and market access challenges for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, there has been growing criticism of the conservation deal as privileging those same multinational corporations over Brazil\u2019s own agricultural producers. Soy farmers and cattle ranchers have long opposed the moratorium, saying it hampers their business. (Raising beef is reliant on soybean production, as one of the major uses of soy globally is animal feed<\/a>.) Brazilian farmers have been pressuring the state of Mato Grosso to re-level the playing field between them and soy traders, which one farmer lobbying group referred to as a \u201cpurchasing cartel.\u201d<\/a> The dissent came to a head when, last year, Brazil\u2019s anti-competition regulator attempted to squash<\/a> the moratorium by ordering participating companies to cease complying or face hefty fines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mato Grosso\u2019s new tax law appears intended to do that re-levelling. By one estimate, tax subsidies for companies participating in the moratorium amounted to $840 million between 2019 and 2024<\/a>. Jo\u00e3o Brites, director of growth and innovation at HowGood, a startup that helps food retailers and manufacturers decarbonize their supply chains, called traders leaving the deal a \u201chuge loss.\u201d <\/p>\n

Cargill refers requests for comment to the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries \u2014\u00a0or ABIOVE \u2014 the lobbying group that announced its decision to leave the moratorium last week. In a press release, ABIOVE confirmed it has begun talks to withdraw from the soybean agreement, adding that other \u201cpublic policies for the preservation and control of deforestation,\u201d like Brazil\u2019s Forest Code, will continue. \u201cThe legacy of monitoring and the expertise acquired over almost 20 years will not be lost,\u201d the group wrote.<\/p>\n

Brites added that weakening the moratorium will likely have numerous negative repercussions for the ecology of the Amazon and for its ability to sequester carbon.\u00a0Deforestation releases the carbon dioxide stores in trees back into the atmosphere, turning some parts of the Amazon from carbon sinks to carbon sources<\/a>. It also threatens the ecosystem\u2019s biodiversity, as species experience the loss of habitat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the most important ways deforestation deteriorates the environment has to do with water, said Brites. The water cycle \u2014\u00a0whereby trees take in water from the soil, transpire it into the atmosphere, and that water falls in the form of precipitation over the landscape \u2014\u00a0is of critical importance in the Amazon, especially in areas that are furthest from the ocean. If trees disappear, \u201cyou\u2019re actually arming the ability of those local ecosystems to be resilient. You\u2019re actually impacting the amount of rainfall,\u201d said Brites, adding that rainfall is also \u201cdirectly connected to agricultural yields.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"fiveA soybean plantation in Bahia, Brazil.
Paulo Fridman \/ Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n

ABIOVE\u2019s announcement is a \u201cvery bad sign that the market no longer wants to actually go into this direction of sustainability, which is really, really bad,\u201d said Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, or IPAM.<\/p>\n

There are many public and private initiatives to preserve forest land in the Amazon \u2014\u00a0and many accusations of greenwashing<\/a>. But the soy moratorium is considered to have been especially successful over the last 20 years at getting big corporations on board with sustainability. In the absence of this agreement, companies can certainly still make and pursue commitments to conservation and biodiversity. For example, Cargill, which buys soy from Brazilian farmers and sells soy products to McDonalds and other major food retailers, has said it will continue to work toward its own goal to make its supply chains \u201cfree of deforestation\u201d by 2030<\/a>. But that deadline is a few years away, Brites pointed out, and means the corporation can still source from newly deforested lands until then \u2014\u00a0whereas under the soy moratorium, it had vowed not to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The weakening of the soy moratorium also threatens Indigenous lands in the Amazon, as agricultural producers seek new areas in which to expand. \u201cThere is a risk,\u201d said Alencar, especially if Indigenous lands are not properly demarcated<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The\u00a0news from ABIOVE comes not long after COP30 was held in Bel\u00e9m, Brazil \u2014 where the host country underscored its commitment to protecting its forests. Contrary to the position championed at COP, this development may reflect how the private sector feels less political and social pressure to act in the best interest of the planet, as governments like the second Trump administration openly roll back sustainability and climate initiatives. \u201cIn my entire life \u2014\u00a0not just in my career, but in my entire life \u2014 I have never seen a time where political elites care less about nature,\u201d said Hurowitz.<\/p>\n

He argued that commodity traders like Cargill and others will have to work harder to demonstrate their commitment to protecting forests.<\/p>\n

Going forward, there will be \u201csome significant amount of consumers probably worried about the fact that they\u2019re going to be complicit in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest,\u201d said Hurowitz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That pressure, after all, was part of the reason why, 20 years ago, Cargill and others came together and signed on to the soy moratorium in the first place. \u201cIt got to be a real brand problem for these companies,\u201d he said. Whether that happens again remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

This story has been updated with a response from ABIOVE.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 20 years ago, a Brazilian lobbying group for soy trading and processing companies signed onto a historic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-239212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}