Sustainable soy: When collaborating to protect the Amazon backfires  

A soy field stands next to a fragment of the Amazon forest at the region of Cipoal in Santarem, Para state, Brazil (2019). Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Commodity firms working together to source deforestation-free soy in Brazil are being investigated under anti-cartel laws. They also risk losing tax benefits due to pressure from powerful farming lobbies.  

Businesses selling prostheses, gas water-heaters, electricity meters, cement and even tech giants like Apple and Meta have recently come under fire from Brazil’s competition watchdog, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), for anti-competitive practices. Also among the alleged offenders targeted by CADE are “do gooding” commodity giants that have signed the Amazon soy moratorium.

The moratorium, which has been implemented since 2008, is a promise not to source soy from the Amazon following a 2006 Greenpeace campaign that linked soybean cultivation with deforestation. Switzerland is the European trading hub of the biggest commodity firms like Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus Company and COFCO that have signed up to the soy moratorium.  

According to Greenpeace, the moratorium has brought the share of new soy cultivation in logged areas down from 30% before the agreement to 4% as of July 2025 even though Brazil has tripled its soy production during this period. Given the results, Greenpeace calls the Amazon soy moratorium as “the world’s single most successful zero-deforestation policy”. 

However, this moratorium is now under pressure due to the investigation of commodity firms by CADE after a complaint was filed last year by the Agriculture, Livestock, Supply, and Rural Development Committee (CAPADR) of Brazil’s lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. The committee’s president, Rodolfo Nogueira, is a cattle rancher himself. Nogueira and the three other members of CAPADR are all pro-agribusiness and belong to the ruralist political bloc that favours the expansion of agriculture.  

According to CADE, the fact that competing firms were working together to establish conditions for the purchase of soy in Brazil is anticompetitive and harms the nation’s soy exports. In 2020, Brazil exported almost 83 million metric tonnes of soy. In 2024, exports totalled roughly 98.8 million metric tonnes, mainly fuelled by demand from China.  

In August 2025, CADE issued an interim measure against the moratorium’s Soy Working Group to stop all audits of soy sourcing, cease publication of reports and remove any documents on the soy moratorium from the website. An appeal was filed against the measure and Brazil’s supreme court has granted a stay while it assesses the accusation against the commodity companies.  

“Currently, CADE’s administrative proceeding is suspended due to a decision by the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF), which will ultimately determine whether the conducts by the soy moratorium are antitrust violations,” says Débora Alvares, spokesperson for CADE. 

If CADE succeeds in convincing Brazil’s supreme court, commodity firms will no longer be able to work together to prevent deforestation at a landscape level. Each company will be reduced to preventing deforestation in its own soy supply chain risking a doubling of effort and covering a much smaller area. Environmental lobby groups like Greenpeace claim that applying anti-cartel regulations against commodity firms in this manner could jeopardise progress made in reducing deforestation of the Amazon for agriculture. 

“Greenpeace warns that the various attacks against the soy moratorium put at risk the gains achieved by this agreement over nearly two decades. Ambitious voluntary environmental commitments like the moratorium have proven an essential complement to public policies aimed at preventing deforestation,” says Lis Cunha, a campaigner at Greenpeace International. 

Greenpeace Brazil is participating in the case before Brazil’s supreme court in an advisory capacity (amicus curiae), presenting legal and technical arguments to demonstrate the risks of dismantling the moratorium and to help support the court’s final assessment of the matter. 

Soy farmers complain of overreach 

Among the soy moratorium’s detractors is the powerful Brazilian Association of Soybean Producers (Aprosoja Brasil), a lobby representing 16 state associates located in the main soybean producing states of the country.  

Aprosoja argues that the soy moratorium was an interim measure to protect Brazil’s forests in the absence of a specific law against deforestation. According to the industry association, the introduction of the Forest Code law in 2012 should have spelled the end of the moratorium. The Forest Code requires farmers in forest areas to set aside 80% of their land for native vegetation cover.  

“The Soy Moratorium no longer has a reason to exist. Almost 20 years later, it remains thanks to the institutional support of the ministry of the environment, which uses it according to its whims,” Pedro Lupion, a Federal Deputy and President of the Parliamentary Agricultural Front wrote on the Aprosoja websiteExternal link.  

Aprosoja’s branch in the western state of Mato Grosso, where soy accounts for half of GDP, had also filed a complaint to CADE in 2024 against the soy moratorium. According to the complaint, the moratorium had cost Mato Grosso state about 20 billion reals ($3.8 billion, CHF3 billion) in lost income. 

Tax benefits at risk 

The state of Mato Grosso also launched another line of attack against commodity firms’ efforts to source sustainable soy from Brazil. In 2024, the state’s lawmakers introduced a law that strips tax benefits of companies that participate in voluntary environmental agreements that go beyond national legislation like the Amazon soy moratorium. Politicians and soy producers argued that even though soy farmers were adhering to Brazilian environmental law, they were being unfairly punished by private, foreign‑influenced standards. Aprosoja’s Mato Grosso branch estimated that soy from 4,000 rural properties, or 3.5% of all farms in the state, was being excluded by commodity firms that had signed up to the soy moratorium.  

It is estimated that these commodity traders had received tax incentives worth about 4.7 billion reais ($890 million) between 2019 and 2024 with ADM and Bunge the largest beneficiaries, receiving roughly 1.5 billion reais each.  

The new law applies from 2026 and has succeeded in scaring away commodity firms. The Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, known as ABIOVE, announced in December 2025 that it was withdrawing from the soy moratorium. Among ABIOVE’s members are Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus Company and COFCO International.  

This is a U-turn from ABIOVE whose president, André Nassar, had defended the soy moratorium at a public hearing on the moratorium in July 2024 held at the behest of parliamentarians opposed to it at the Agriculture, Livestock, Supply and Rural Development Committee of the Chamber of Deputies.  

Nassar had tried to get soy producers on board by offering Aprosoja a seat on the soy moratorium’s working group. He had even warned that the end of the soy moratorium could lead to a boycott of Brazilian soybeans abroad.  

The opportunity cost to commodity firms from the soy moratorium has not been quantified. However, a study estimatesExternal link that surplus land legally available to soy producers in the Amazon since the Forest Code was introduced in 2012 is below 50,000 hectares. This represents about 1% of the area already under soy cultivation in the Amazon. The authors of the study claim that the financial benefits of transforming these forested areas into soy farms are low when compared to the export markets for sustainable soy.  

According to Greenpeace, ABIOVE’s decision was based on political and economic incentives rather than a legal obligation. “This was a business choice, not a legal necessity, and it is ABIOVE and its members who must take responsibility for the environmental and reputational consequences of that choice,” says Cunha of Greenpeace. 

ABIOVE underlined that even though it was withdrawing from the soy moratorium, Brazil’s supreme court still recognises the legality of the voluntary agreement. Along with Forest Code and the September 2025 National Environment Council (CONAMA) Resolution (which laid down the ground rules for clearing native vegetation in rural Brazil), Brazilian soy will continue to maintain its high socio-environmental standards.  

“The legacy of monitoring and expertise acquired over almost 20 years will not be lost. Individually, the strict demands of global markets will be met, while also relying on Brazilian authorities to fully implement a new regulatory framework,” said the ABIOVE statement.  

Domino effect? 

The combination of the anti-cartel investigation and removal of tax benefits could also threaten another sustainable soy sourcing initiative by ABIOVE that is hosted in Switzerland by the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The Soft Commodity Forum (SCF) comprising Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus Company and COFCO International is a pilot project to source soy without deforestation in the Cerrado. 

The Cerrado is a tropical savanna that occupies a little over 20% of Brazil’s landmass and is South America’s second-largest biome after the Amazon. The region also accounts for half of all soy grown in Brazil. The SCF started out as a pilot project in 2018 to trace soy sourced from 25 municipalities in the Cerrado biome. By the end of 2025, the collaboration has expanded traceability to 93%-99% of the soy sourced by members from the Cerrado, representing monitoring of over 200 million hectares.

According to SCF senior manager Matt Inbusch, the partnership is about getting the five commodity firms to align on a common deforestation and land conversion reporting methodology.  

“SCF membership does not imply any collective sourcing agreements or cutoffs,” he says.  

While CADE does not yet have the SCF in its sights, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of an anti-cartel investigation in the future.

“Thus far, CADE has not ultimately decided whether the alignment of transparency standards and metrics among companies, such as the ones conducted in the Soft Commodity Forum, can be defined as antitrust violations or not, since every assessment depends on the actual analysis of the conduct and its potential competition effects,” says Alvares of CADE. 

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ts