Brazil’s Amazon rainforest at risk as key protection threatened

The Amazon rainforest could face a new surge in deforestation as efforts increase to overturn a long-standing ban that has protected it.

The ban, which prohibits the sale of soybeans grown on land cleared after 2008, is widely credited with slowing deforestation and has been considered a global environmental success story.

But powerful agricultural interests in Brazil, backed by a group of Brazilian politicians, are pushing to lift restrictions as the UN COP30 climate conference enters its second week.

Critics of the ban say it is an unfair “cartel” that allows a small group of powerful companies to dominate the soybean trade in the Amazon.

Environmental groups have warned that lifting the ban would be a “disaster”, opening the way to a new wave of land grabs to plant more soybeans in the world’s largest rainforest.

Scientists say ongoing deforestation, combined with the effects of climate change, is already pushing the Amazon toward a potential “tipping point,” a threshold beyond which the rainforest can no longer sustain itself.

Brazil is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, a staple crop for its protein and an important animal feed.

Much of the meat consumed in the UK (including chicken, beef, pork and farmed fish) is raised using feedstuffs including soya beans, around 10% of which comes from the Brazilian Amazon.

Many of the UK’s major food companies, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Aldi, Lidl, McDonald’s, Greggs and KFC, are members of a coalition called UK Soy Manifesto, which accounts for around 60% of imported soya in the UK.

The group supports the ban, which is officially known as the Amazon Soy Moratorium, because they argue it helps ensure UK soy supply chains remain deforestation-free.

In a statement earlier this year, the signatories said: “We urge all actors within the soybean supply chain, including governments, financial institutions and agribusiness, to reinforce their commitment to [ban] and ensure its continuation.”

Public opinion in the UK also appears to be firmly behind protecting the Amazon. A World Wildlife Fund survey conducted earlier this year found that 70% of respondents supported government action to remove illegal deforestation from UK supply chains.

But Brazilian opponents of the deal last week demanded that the Supreme Court, the country’s highest court, reopen an investigation into whether the moratorium amounts to anti-competitive behavior.

“Our state has a lot of room to grow and the soy moratorium goes against this development,” Vanderlei Ataídes told the BBC. He is president of the Soybean Producers Association of the state of Pará, one of the main soybean producing areas in Brazil.

“I don’t understand how [the ban] It helps the environment,” he added. “I can’t plant soybeans, but I can use the same land to plant corn, rice, cotton or other crops. Why can’t I plant soybeans?”

The challenge has even divided the Brazilian government. While the Ministry of Justice claims there may be evidence of anti-competitive behavior, both the Ministry of the Environment and the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office have publicly defended the moratorium.

The voluntary agreement was first signed almost two decades ago by farmers, environmental organizations and major global food companies, including commodities giants such as Cargill and Bunge.

This followed a campaign by environmental pressure group Greenpeace which exposed how soya grown on deforested land was being used in animal feed, including chicken sold by McDonald’s.

The fast food chain became a supporter of the moratorium, whose signatories pledged not to buy soybeans grown on deforested lands after 2008.

Before the moratorium, forest clearing for soy expansion and livestock growth were the main drivers of Amazon deforestation.

After the introduction of the agreement, forest clearing fell sharply, reaching a record low in 2012, during President Lula’s second term.

Deforestation increased under subsequent administrations – particularly under Jair Bolsonaro, who promoted the opening of forests to economic development – ​​but has fallen again under Lula’s current presidency.

Bel Lyon, senior advisor for Latin America at the World Wildlife Fund, one of the original signatories of the agreement, warned that suspending the moratorium “would be a disaster for the Amazon, its people and the world, because it could open an area the size of Portugal to deforestation.”

Small farmers whose plots are near soybean plantations say they disrupt local weather patterns and make growing crops difficult.

Raimundo Barbosa, who grows cassava and fruit near the town of Boa Esperança, outside Santarém in the southeastern Amazon, says that when the forest is cut down “the environment is destroyed.”

“Where there is forest, it is normal, but when it disappears it gets hotter and hotter and there is less rain and less water in the rivers,” he told me as we sat in the shade next to the machines he uses to turn his cassava into flour.

The push to lift the moratorium comes as Brazil prepares to open a major new railway that will stretch from its agricultural heartland in the south to the rainforest.

The railroad is expected to significantly reduce transportation costs for soybeans and other agricultural products, adding yet another incentive to clear more land.

Scientists say deforestation is already profoundly transforming the rainforest. Among them is Amazon specialist Bruce Fosberg, who has spent half a century studying the forest.

Climb 15 stories to a narrow tower that rises 45 meters above a pristine rainforest reserve in the heart of the Amazon. From a small platform at the top, look out over a sea of ​​green that stretches to the horizon.

The tower is packed with high-tech instruments: sensors that track almost everything that happens between the forest and the atmosphere: water vapor, carbon dioxide, sunlight, and essential nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.

The tower was built 27 years ago and is part of a project, the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment (LBA), which aims to understand how the Amazon is changing and how close it is to a critical threshold.

The LBA data, along with other scientific studies, show that parts of the rainforest may be approaching a “tipping point,” after which the ecosystem can no longer maintain its own functions.

“The living forest is closing in,” he says, “and is not producing water vapor and therefore rain.”

As trees are lost to deforestation, fires and heat stress, the forest releases less moisture into the atmosphere, he explains, reducing precipitation and intensifying drought. That, in turn, creates a feedback loop that kills even more trees.

The fear is that if this continues, vast areas of rainforest could disappear and become a savanna or dry grassland ecosystem.

Such a collapse would release enormous amounts of carbon, alter weather patterns on every continent, and threaten millions of people – as well as countless species of plants, insects, and animals – whose lives depend on the Amazon for survival.