The moratorium to protect the Amazon rainforest from soya cultivation has been hailed as a victory. Even so, it has a number of weaknesses.
Soya from Brazil regularly reaches Europe. Even when it has been grown by those who destroy the Amazon rainforest. Even though, to prevent precisely this from happening, a moratorium had been in force since 2006 and had until now appeared to be effective. Shedding light on the weaknesses of this system is an investigation carried out by the Brazilian NGO Instituto centro de vida and published by Unearthed, the investigative journalism unit affiliated with the environmental organisation Greenpeace.
Driven by pressure from international environmental organisations, Greenpeace above all, in 2006 Brazilian soya traders signed a moratorium formally committing themselves not to purchase soya that had been grown on land converted to agriculture from 2008 onwards — and therefore, in all likelihood, deforested specifically for that purpose. The initiative was greeted with enthusiasm by environmentalists. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), marking its tenth anniversary, described it as "the greatest global benchmark for zero deforestation". The results achieved are indeed tangible. A study published in Nature Food argues that it prevented the destruction of 18,000 square kilometres of forest.
There are, however, a number of weaknesses. To uncover them, the researchers cross-referenced satellite data on deforestation, agricultural landholding registers and maps of soya cultivation in 2019. The findings are clear-cut: 1,180 square kilometres of Amazon rainforest, in the state of Mato Grosso, were destroyed between 2009 and 2019 to expand soya plantations. Illegally. And these are conservative estimates, since they are based on the 2019 maps — the year in which the administration led by Jair Bolsonaro had reclassified certain areas critical to deforestation as "savannah", thereby removing them from the scope of the regulations.
The weakness of this system lies in the fact that it refers solely and exclusively to soya. As a result, checks are highly targeted. This means that some producers continue undisturbed to destroy the Amazon rainforest to make way for livestock, maize or other crops — while in the meantime growing soya that they then pass off as "clean" and sell without any difficulty.
This investigation comes just days after the publication of a damning study by Greenpeace on the first three years of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil. Three years in which deforestation of the Amazon grew by 52.9 per cent compared with the preceding three-year period. This entailed an increase in emissions of 10 per cent — an enormous figure that places Brazil fifth in the ranking of countries contributing most to global warming. And that is not all. In 2020, a combination of drought and fires set by farmers destroyed a third of the Pantanal area, the largest wetland on Earth and habitat of jaguars and other endangered species.
