The Amazon soy moratorium is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between civil society, industry and government. It has already produced a spectacular drop in Amazon deforestation. And now the moratorium will last until — as the renewal document says — it is no longer needed.
This month — after months of negotiation and uncertainty — the Brazilian government, the soy industry and civil society organizations, including ,
Renewed an agreement keeping huge swathes of Amazon rainforest from being destroyed for soybean farming. This is big news for the Amazon, for Indigenous Peoples, for farmers, for business and for all of us around the world fighting to end deforestation.
Aerial View, Primary Tropical Rainforest With Savanna Grassland Crops Agriculture, Amazon, Brazil, South America Stock Photo
The agreement — called the soy moratorium — is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between civil society, industry and government. It has already produced a spectacular drop in Amazon deforestation. And now the moratorium will last until — as the renewal document says — it is no longer needed.
A decade ago, the Brazilian Amazon was in a full-blown soy crisis. From 2004 to 2005, the rainforest was being destroyed at the second highest rate ever recorded, due in large part to a rising demand for land to grow soy and cattle. The outlook for the Amazon seemed bleak as the global demand for soy skyrocketed.
But in 2006, everything begun to change. That year, released a report exposing the links between deforestation in the Amazon, soy and meat (between 70 percent and 90 percent of the world’s soybean crop is used as animal feed). The research showed that companies like McDonald’s and other fast food and supermarket chains were serving meat likely fed soy grown on destroyed Amazon rainforest.
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After massive outcry from people all over the world demanding action to ensure that their products weren’t connected to Amazon deforestation, the industry had to respond. The soy moratorium was their answer to that pressure. Together, the soy industry and civil society organizations led by hashed out this powerful agreement.
At the core of the moratorium is a simple idea: that companies wouldn’t buy soy from soy traders who get their supply from farmers who clear the rainforest, use slave labour or threaten Indigenous Lands. The agreement is proof of what can be accomplished when civil society and companies work together.
Over the last few years there have been extensive and difficult negotiations about extending that moratorium each time it needed renewal. But every year since it was first established, the moratorium has continued. And – as of this week – I can say with confidence that it will continue to fight deforestation until there is a permanent solution to stop forest destruction.
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Because of the moratorium, the threat of soy is no longer seen as a major driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Through satellite monitoring and aerial surveying, the moratorium monitors 76 municipalities responsible for 98 percent of the soy produced in the Amazon region. This way, the Soy Working Group can tell when new deforestation is occurring for soy and who is behind the destruction.
It’s because of this vigilance that even as Brazil’s soy production has gone up dramatically, deforestation for soy has remained low. Since 2006, the amount of land soy occupies in the Amazon region is up 260 percent, but only a bit more than one percent of that soy is being grown in newly deforested areas.
The moratorium has done a great job of preventing soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon. The indefinite renewal of the soy moratorium is also a sign of what partnerships between industry and civil society can achieve to save our planet. As political uncertainty grows in Brazil, the agreement can provide the market with strong guarantees that Brazilian soy is forest friendly.
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But while the moratorium is widely credited as a major factor in the reduction of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, the fight to end Amazon destruction is far from over.
The Amazon still faces catastrophic mega-dams, illegal logging operations and other commodities driving deforestation – like cattle. And will need your support every step of the way to take on these challenges. After all, the soy moratorium was only possible because people around the world demanded it!
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August 15, 2019 — When loggers and cattle ranchers began toppling the rainforest in Brazil’s far western state of Acre, they revealed a mystery: vast ancient earthworks, hidden for centuries under the trees.
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These “geoglyphs” took the form of geometric shapes — squares, rectangles and circles — hundreds of meters across, marked out with ditches and raised mounds. Since the 1980s, around 450 geoglyphs have been identified in Acre alone, dating back between 650 and 2, 000 years — offering new perspectives on the supposed pristine nature of the Amazon as well as insights into how agriculture and healthy ecosystems might coexist.
The Amazon has long been thought of as an untrammeled ecosystem, a wilderness relatively untouched by humans. Indigenous peoples were presumed to be so few in number, and live so lightly on the land, that they had a negligible impact on the environment.
But recent interdisciplinary research across the Amazon basin is overturning that old story. It’s showing instead that the rainforest’s early inhabitants numbered in the millions, and that they managed the landscape intensively, in complex and sustainable ways — offering lessons for how we manage the Amazon today.
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Jennifer Watling, currently an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, spent several seasons digging holes in some of Acre’s geoglyphs for her Ph.D. research at the University of Exeter in the U.K.
It is still unclear exactly what the geoglyphs were used for, Watling says. From the lack of household debris, it seems people didn’t live there, but perhaps visited for ceremonies and other special events. New tools, including the analysis of microscopic plant remains called phytoliths, are helping archaeologists find other stories in the soil.
Agroforesters grow crops among trees for benefits such as increased biodiversity and soil health. Of the ancient sites archaeologists are finding in Brazil, one researcher says, “It looks a lot like agroforestry — managing the landscape, encouraging palms and probably other useful plants as well.” Photo courtesy of Icaro Cooke Vieira/CIFOR
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“Unlike today, they weren’t just completely denuding the landscape and creating monocultures, ” Watling says. Instead, the number of palm trees around the sites increased over time. “It looks a lot like agroforestry — managing the landscape, encouraging palms and probably other useful plants as well, ” Watling says.
“The more that we’re digging and looking into plant remains and ecology, the more we’re seeing that actually large areas of the Amazon were inhabited, and people had significant impacts on soils, on ecosystems — and in some areas we can see those impacts today.”
Similar earthworks have now been found along 1, 800 kilometers (1, 100 miles) of southern Amazonia. “Everywhere we’re looking, we’re finding people, ” says Mark Robinson, also from the University of Exeter, which has been delving into these questions for the past few years.
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Robinson and some colleagues were scrolling around the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso on Google Earth, looking at areas that had been recently deforested. “Suddenly we started seeing these big earthworks — hold on, that’s not natural!”
When Robinson’s team went there and started digging, they identified 81 new archaeological sites, mainly ditched enclosures, as well as ceramics and stone tools. “It was a whole culture no one had ever seen before.”
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The results, published in Nature Communications, provided the missing link between Acre and the eastern Amazon, Robinson says: “We could show the whole southern rim of the Amazon was occupied.”
Understanding how all those people shaped their environment, and how resilient those ecosystems were to human disturbance, is critical for making informed decisions today, Robinson says.
“Populations in forested areas worldwide, especially in tropical areas, are increasing, so to make sustainable choices about how to interact with resources is going to be really integral, ” he says. Research from other parts of the Amazon is raising intriguing suggestions about how to do that.
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Further north, near where the Tapajós River meets the Amazon in the Brazilian state
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