In 2006, following a report from Greenpeace and under pressure from consumers, large companies such as McDonald's and Walmart decided to stop using soy grown on cleared forestland in the Brazilian Amazon. This put pressure on commodity traders, such as Cargill, who in turn agreed to no longer purchase soy from farmers who cleared rain forest to expand soy fields.
The private sector agreement, a type of supply chain governance, is called the Soy Moratorium and it was intended to address the deforestation caused by soy production in the Amazon. In a recent study to evaluate the agreement, published in the journal Science, the University of Wisconsin, Madison's Holly Gibbs and colleagues across the U.S. and Brazil show that the moratorium helped to drastically reduce the amount of deforestation linked to soy production in the region and was much better at curbing it than governmental policy alone.
"What we found is that before the moratorium, 30 percent of soy expansion occurred through deforestation, and after the moratorium, almost none did; only about 1 percent of the new soy expansion came at the expense of forest," said Gibbs, a professor of environmental studies and geography in UW-Madison Nelson Institute's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.
Read the full article here.
Complete photo caption: Brazilian farmers examine their soybean crop. Under the Soy Moratorium, major trading companies do not purchase soybeans produced in the Brazilian Amazon on recently deforested areas.
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