A meeting which took place in São Paulo on July 8 marked the renovation of the moratorium on soy in the Amazon Rainforest for the fourth year running. This means that, at least until the same period in 2011, members of Brazil’s Vegetable Oils Industry Association (Abiove) and of the of Cereal Exporters National Association (Anec) remain committed to the public agreement of not selling soybeans grown in deforested areas in the Amazon Rainforest after July 2006, the date in which the moratorium that counts on support by the Ministry of the Environment, was initially signed.

“We encourage other companies and sectors, including governments, to join similar efforts to ensure that the Amazon Rainforest is not devastated for the production of any type of commodity. The registration of farms within the biome is crucial. We all agree that the process must continue”, says a public note disclosed by Brazilian soy consuming companies such as McDonald’s and Carrefour.

This piece of good news came followed by another: for the first time since the beginning of the agreement, the Soy Workgroup (GTS) made a partnership with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in order to supervise the observance of this moratorium. This time, monitoring was done by means of satellite images which enabled the investigation of a larger number of deforested areas and estates. This workgroup is made up of Abiove and Anec, aside from civil society organizations such as Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and WWF-Brasil.

This represents a great deal of headway in the quality of the monitoring of illegal soy in the Amazon that has been conducted since the harvest of 2007/2008. In order to increase the precision of the results even further, databases from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (Funai) were also employed, as well as those from the Brazilian Environment and Renewable Natural Resources Institute (Ibama), Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the Amazonian Man and Environment Institute (Imazon).

As part of the criteria, the states monitored were Mato Grosso, Pará and Rondônia, since they concentrate 98% of the biome’s soy production. Areas occupied by conservation units and tribe reservations were left out. The monitoring employed images from the Terra/MODIS satellite combined with information from the Prodes project that supplied the base of deforesting occurred from 2007 to 2009.

The surveys were conducted in municipalities whose current harvest or forecast for the following year indicated a soy plantation area above 5 thousand hectares (ha) as well all estates larger than 25 ha – in previous years, only areas larger than 100 ha were monitored. Thanks to the partnership, it was possible to identify small deforestations and 4.7 more estates in comparison with the previous year. The area observed grew from 158 thousand to 302 thousand hectares.


Between December 18, 2009 and March 7, 2010, 107 fly-over hours were performed, covering 14,830 kilometers and 29 municipalities. The monitoring task also involved field trips and numerous visits back and forth to notary offices in order to identify rural properties and producers that violated the moratorium and felled the forest to plant soy.

78% of the new deforesting occurred in areas with more than 100ha. In all, 6,295 deforested hectares were identified. After July 2006, with the presence of soy, the equivalent of 0.25% of the deforesting occurred in the Amazon’s biome in the three states monitored during the triennial period of 2007-2008-2009. “Is that all? Yes, it’s not much, but we have an ambitious goal, which is zero deforesting or, in other words, that no more areas within the Amazon Rainforest are deforested for planting soy”, states Raquel Carvalho, of Greenpeace’s Amazonian Campaign.

Monitoring and punishment

Learn more about the moratorium on soy On July 24 2006, industries and exporters associated to Abiove and Anec signed a moratorium on soy, publicly committing themselves not to trade grain derived from deforested areas from that date onwards. Since then, this commitment has been renewed. This means that producers who violate the moratorium run the risk of ending up alone with their grain since, by market rules (even if the deforesting has been allowed), they are barred from conducting commercial activities with the major companies of a sector, thanks to the agreement taken up in the moratorium. The moratorium is a tool that benefits export, since 50% of the European market refuses to buy soy derived from deforested areas. Therefore, it is a good deal for the producer that follows its rules. In spite of that, China, the largest importer of grains from Brazil, does not have the same concerns as the European market, which can encourage exports of soy produced in newly deforested areas. Greenpeace warns that there is still no transparent tracking system for direct purchases or those done through the spot market, one in which soy remains available for immediate delivery upon purchase.

“In the old days, most of the deforesting performed in the biome was due to soy. Not so today. Deforesting has not yet been reduced to zero, but this is a fact to be celebrated nevertheless”, states Bernardo Rudorff, of Inpe’s Remote Sensing Division. According to him, the partnership with the institute will be maintained until next year.

“These results show that it is possible to produce without deforesting”, says Fabio Trigueirinho, Abiove’s secretary general. “However, one must strengthen strategies such as the Rural Environmental Records (CAR), environmental laws, technical support for producers and a credit policy that doesn’t threaten forests”, complements Raquel.

According to Greenpeace, most of the soy farms in the biome are still not officially mapped and registered. The organization claims that state and the federal governments must implement the Rural Environmental Records of properties throughout the Amazon up to the end of this year, because the mechanism allows the identification of land owners and can become an important tool in the monitoring of the moratorium.

Trigueirinho claims that currently there is no obligation on the part of member buyers that producers actually have the CAR. “We cannot demand this in a moment in which the forest code is still being discussed among so many uncertainties”, says he.

The first monitoring did not find any soy plantations. The second was conducted during the harvest of 2008/2009. Planting within deforested areas after the declaration of the moratorium was detected in 12 estates. The identified violators were barred from receiving financings and could not sell their produce to companies belonging to Abiove or to Anec. That represented significant losses for those producers, since together they represent more than 90% of the soy sold  in Brazil. Major multinationals are among the members of both institutions, such as ADM, Amaggi, Cargill, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus. Despite the punishments, the list of deforested areas jumped to 76 this year, distributed throughout 20 municipalities. The same punitive procedure will be adopted for the currently identified violators.

“The market is showing that it is no use to deforest to produce, because the consumer doesn’t want a product that is derived from the deforesting of the Amazon Rainforest. This lends more credibility to Brazilian soy in the international market, because we count on a transparent monitoring system, and we are committed not to buy soy from deforested areas. Those who deforest will have to find another way to sell their produce, and still take on the risk of having the price of their product devaluated”, says Trigueirinho.

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Karina Miotto is a journalist graduated by PUC-SP. She is a freelance journalist for the Abril Group, she loves to travel and ended up in the Amazon region where she began to work for Greenpeace and write for magazines such as Terra da Gente and National Geographic. She’s the author of the Eco-Repórter-Eco blog, and a correspondent for ((o)) eco Amazonia.