According to a study conducted by Robert Toovey Walker of the University of Florida and recently published in the journal Environment, if nothing is done to reverse course on deforestation and the fight against climate change, the Amazon will be wiped out by 2064, passing, with no way back, from a lush rainforest to an open savannah dominated by grasses and shrubs.

If this news leads us to dramatic future scenarios, another gives us hope that the Amazon's fate could be different. A study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Wisconsin–Madison and published in Nature Food has calculated that a moratorium signed by a number of soy traders has had the merit of slowing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over the past ten years.

Soy moratorium, less deforestation in 10 years

Following the launch, in 2006, of a Greenpeace campaign calling for an end to the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon caused by the continuing expansion of soy cultivation, a group of traders in the legume signed the Amazon Soy Moratorium, a formal commitment not to purchase soy originating from newly cultivated areas. According to the researchers' calculations, the agreement had the effect of preventing, between 2006 and 2016, the destruction of more than 18,000 sq km of forest — 35 per cent less than would have occurred had the agreement not been in place. The success of the initiative, as noted in the study, is due to several factors, including a 90 per cent uptake of the moratorium among traders and collaboration between the private sector, the Brazilian government and NGOs.

An open-ended moratorium

Returning to Professor Walker's study, the expert notes that, around the turn of the millennium, various environmental policies in Brazil reduced deforestation in the Amazon, which reached its lowest point in 2012, but that those same policies "began to unravel at almost the same moment they proved effective". This does not appear to be the case with the soy moratorium, which in 2016 was renewed indefinitely — or at least until it is no longer needed. A demonstration of how commitment to the environment can create virtuous cycles of land management, even when strong commercial interests are at stake.