Grain barges in Brazil are expanding into the Amazon, driven by global soy demand. Photo / Dado Galdieri, The Washington Post
Deep in Brazil, grain barges glide down rivers where only jungle once stretched.
Shippers stop at terminals thousands of kilometres from the country’s traditional ports.
Fields once razed for cattle or left untouched now grow millions of tonnes of the country’s biggest export, soybeans.
The world’s voracious appetite for soy now has farmers edging deeper and deeper into the Amazon rainforest to grow the oilseed, aided by billions of dollars in infrastructure that’s making once unreachable corners viable for trading exports.
That’s testing Brazil’s ability to balance its mighty agriculture industry, which accounts for more than a quarter of gross domestic product, with its climate goals.
A landmark industry pact – the Amazon Soy Moratorium, which prohibits traders from buying soy grown on recently deforested land – is now fraying as the country’s Government investigates whether it has created a cartel in the export market.
And a controversial proposal to pave a highway deeper into untouched forest threatens to accelerate the spread of soy across one of Earth’s most sensitive ecosystems.
All the while, demand is surging as Brazil’s biggest customer, China, increases its reliance on the country for the oilseed in response to US tariffs.
The soy expansion is a critical issue for Brazil as it prepares to host the Cop30 climate summit in Belém in November, with one of the event’s main themes being the prevention of deforestation.
While most new soy territory in the Amazon region has replaced land already cleared for cattle or other crops, deforestation persists.
Trees are still being cleared, often illegally, before being converted into pasture – a staging ground for more intensive soybean planting in the future.
“There is a growing call in the region from agribusiness actors to pave roads and improve the infrastructure to transport production,” said Felipe Petrone, an environmental scientist whose master’s thesis at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research focused on the new agriculture frontier in the Amazon.
With those moves, “the dynamics of occupation, deforestation and degradation continues to occur”.
The incursion has been building for years, only to rapidly expand over the past decade. Brazil’s farmers first laid down roots in the country’s south before driving the agricultural frontier into the midwest.
From there, they pushed north into a four-state frontier known by the acronym Matopiba, before steadily moving into parts of the Amazon.
The shifts have been profound. In Acre, the westernmost state of the Amazon, there were no reports of soybean crops until 2017.
This year, farmers cultivated an area three times the size of Manhattan, according to data from Brazil’s national crop agency.
Amazonas, also a soy-free state until eight years ago, has seen a similar advance. Rondonia’s soybean acreage has almost tripled over the past decade.
Crop forecasting agency Conab recently predicted that Brazil will harvest another record soy crop next year, meaning farming in those regions will likely continue expanding.
“I’m astonished,” Jose Marcos Leite jnr, a farmer and cattle rancher in the border area between Rondonia and Acre, said of the expanding interest in the region.
He began planting soybeans and corn there two years ago, on land he purchased in the early 2000s that was previously used as pasture. Over the past three years, he said, the value of that land has doubled.
While farmers such as Leite have to obey local regulations and preserve native vegetation on at least 80% of their property, soaring land values have spurred criminals to illegally cut down trees on expectations that restrictions will eventually ease.
“Deforestation becomes a business, that will eventually turn the land over to cattle ranching or soybean farming,” said Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of Observatorio do Clima, a network of climate organisations.
Across the states of Amazonas, Acre and Rondonia, known by the acronym Amacro, almost 1.38 million ha of jungle has been lost to deforestation since 2019.
“It’s very critical,” said Cristiane Mazzetti, a campaigner with Greenpeace who has worked with local communities to document fire outbreaks in the area. “It’s a region very marked by land grabbing, cattle ranching, and we also see the growth of soy there.”
Since taking office in 2023, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has strengthened environmental agencies in the fight against Amazon deforestation.
After peaking in 2021 under President Jair Bolsonaro – who rolled back environmental protections and cut budgets for enforcement agencies – deforestation rates slowed across the entire Amazon territory in Brazil, data from the National Institute for Space Research show.
But farming groups are now using their outsized political clout to crusade against crop traders who committed to not source soybeans directly from deforested land.
The 2006 Amazon Soy Moratorium, backed by commodity-trading giants including Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., Bunge Global SA, Cargill Inc. and Louis Dreyfus Co., was designed to curb the rapid advance of soybean farming into the rainforest, marking one of the first major voluntary supply chain agreements to link global agribusiness with forest protection.
For soy traders, the moratorium is not just altruism but a market response to pressure from buyers overseas. The European Union, for instance, passed a law stating that soybeans from deforested land cannot enter the bloc.
Now, that public commitment is under attack.
Brazil’s anti-trust agency, Cade, in August opened a cartel probe into all major trading companies, following complaints from members of Congress and powerful farm lobbies such as Aprosoja Mato Grosso.
Farmers argue the moratorium unfairly goes beyond what Brazilian law requires, limiting where they can expand production even as global demand for soy surges. They contend that decisions about land use should rest with national legislation, not with private contracts shaped by foreign buyers and environmental groups.
ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus declined to comment, referring questions to the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, a group representing the top traders. The organisation, known as Abiove, said the soy moratorium has been important to ensuring that the advance of the oilseed occurs responsibly.
“The risk lies in the discrediting of the initiative, which could encourage the opening of new areas,” Abiove said in a statement.
That “runs counter to the demands of international markets, which will continue to demand deforestation-free soybeans”.
Adding to tensions, the key soybean-producing states of Mato Grosso, Rondonia and Maranhao have passed laws stripping away tax incentives for trading companies that comply with the moratorium.
That move sparked a legal challenge by a group of political parties, which is now before Brazil’s Supreme Court. So far, four of the court’s 11 justices have partially sided with the state of Mato Grosso, a setback for traders, but the case remains unresolved after another justice requested more time to deliberate in late August.
Those questioning the moratorium are “putting agricultural production and the international reputation of commodities produced in Brazil at risk,” WWF-Brasil said in a note following Cade’s probe. “Allowing the expansion of soy cultivation over the Amazon forest is an unacceptable environmental and climate risk.”
As the fight plays out, new investment is flowing into ports, waterways and highways designed to ease the transport of crops to export hubs. ADM, Cargill, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus have collectively invested billions in terminals and barge fleets, creating a logistics network that moves nearly 40% of Brazil’s soy and corn.
At first, the new shipping routes were meant to move crops from the country’s Midwest. But as infrastructure multiplied, soybean planting spread deeper into the forest itself. The 2021 inauguration of a bridge linking Rondonia and Acre, under Bolsonaro, opened another frontier by making it feasible to move machinery, fertiliser and grain into areas that had previously been too isolated.
New port projects are now planned in Para and Amapa, barge operator Hidrovias do Brasil SA is considering expansions, and five terminals in Porto Velho are on track to move 11 million tonnes of soy this year. Cargill recently started a new facility in Rondonia, while the federal Government prepares to auction waterway concessions.
Traders say that expanding soy area was never the goal of the new ports. The shipping routes are instead necessary because of limited capacity in ports in the south, said Frederico Favacho, a lawyer at Brazil’s ANEC, an industry group representing soybean exporters.
Abiove, the other industry group, said the infrastructure only comes in places where production is in place, rather than paving the way for new areas to be planted.
“Logistics infrastructure is related to efficiency and cost reduction, not to the opening of new areas in the Amazon biome,” the group said.
Yet each new step towards easier logistics has sharpened concerns over deforestation and land pressure.
The latest flashpoint is BR-319, a highway linking Rondonia to Amazonas. Farmers see the paving project as a vital link for cheaper and faster shipments. Environmental groups, however, warn it could open vast stretches of intact forest to deforestation.
The mere speculation of work being done in the area has already led to illegal deforestation, Environment Minister Marina Silva told the Senate in May.
Her appearance erupted into heated exchanges with agriculture caucus members and a senator who accused her of standing in the way of development for asking for more studies on the highway. A few minutes before abruptly departing, Silva issued a plea to all farmers.
“Agriculture depends on biodiversity,” she said amid interruptions. “Why does Brazil have the agriculture it does?”
The Government would later announce a plan to move forward with studies on paving the highway.
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