Soya

Cargill just pledged to protect the world’s forests - but an eight-year truce that protects the Amazon from soya farming is in trouble.

All is not doom and gloom in Brazil. The soya moratorium, which Greenpeace helped establish in 2006, has been renewed for another 12 months, which means another year of soya traders refusing to do business with farmers growing crops on newly deforested land. In addition, companies like McDonalds, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op have reaffirmed their commitment to the moratorium, ensuring that they continue to demand non-Amazon soya at the consumer end too.

There's no denying that the moratorium has been a success. Since it was established four years ago, deforestation rates in the Amazon have decreased while soya yields have increased, showing that (as Paulo Adario from our Brazilian office put it) "production and conservation can go hand in hand".  

With last year's agreement between three of the largest slaughterhouses in Brazil to prevent cattle ranching making further in-roads into the rainforest, we've made great strides in breaking the link between agricultural production and deforestation. But the current attempts to change the forest code could undo much of the success of recent years so there's no rest for the wicked just yet.

Huge areas in the Amazon rainforest are illegally logged to clear land for soya plantations © Greenpeace/Beltra

Some good news just in from Brazil, where soya traders have reinforced their commitment to boycott soya grown in newly deforested areas of the Amazon.

Clearing-cutting to make space for new soya plantations has been one of the main causes of rainforest destruction in recent years, which is why we campaigned successfully for a moratorium (temporary ban) three years ago.