Property Arrangements and Soy Governance in the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso: Implications for Deforestation-Free Production

Abstract

Abstract:The production of soy is one of the most important economic activities in the Brazilian Amazon, though the expansion of this industry has come at the cost of huge swaths of forest. Since 2006, the private firms that buy and trade soybeans globally have assumed a key role in ensuring that soy producers comply with forest protection policies, including the Soy Moratorium and public policies banning the use of illegally deforested land. We used evidence from field interviews and a GIS of property boundaries and soy-production areas to describe the private sector governance process and to characterize the variety of property arrangements underlying soy production in Mato Grosso, the leading soy-producing state in the Brazilian Amazon. These increasingly complex property arrangements include ownership of multiple properties by a single producer, use of rental properties owned by others, and soy and cattle production on a single property. This complexity could create loopholes allowing soy associated with deforestation to enter the supply chain. Comprehensive soy-governance strategies that include more robust procedures for verifying the provenance of soy across all properties, that account for the entire property rather than only the area planted to soy, and that use more transparent verification systems could achieve greater reductions in deforestation.

Pathways for recent Cerrado soybean expansion: extending the soy moratorium and implementing integrated crop livestock systems with soybeans

“…While a Cerrado Soy Moratorium may halt new clearing for soybeans, soy could still displace other land uses occupying eligible area that go on to deforest elsewhere. This phenomenon, which shifts soy's role in forest loss from direct to indirect rather than eliminating it, has been wellobserved in Amazonia [27,32].…”

“…The agreement has been credited with minimizing soy's impact as a direct driver of deforestation in the Amazon by reducing forest loss from new soy expansion to less than 1% [19,31], though this statistic does not consider soy's indirect contributions to forest loss [27,28]. It also does not account for possible laundering occurrences, where soy grown on recently deforested area is funneled into the supply chain using loopholes that exist under complex property arrangements [32].…”

Soy expansion in Brazil's Cerrado

“…Even moderate intensification in the cattle sector could make room for a large amount of soy expansion given that Brazil's pasturelands are currently used at only about one-third of their potential productivity (Strassburg et al, 2017;Strassburg et al, 2014). Increased integration of soy production with cattle ranching could also support expansion of soy on cleared areas (Gil, Garrett, & Berger, 2016;Rausch & Gibbs, 2016). Similarly, policies that support improved efficiency in soy farming could increase production while reducing the need for expansion (Battisti et al, 2018;Rada, 2013).…”

Transparency and sustainability in global commodity supply chains

“…Without this extra information there is a risk of suppliers simply bifurcating two or more product lines to serve more and less responsible buyers (e.g. Moura-Costa, Moura-Costa, & Barros, 2016, and see Rausch & Gibbs, 2016 for an example in soy).…”