Amazon Soy Moratorium
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The Amazon Soy Moratorium is a voluntary private-sector agreement under which soy traders committed not to buy soy from farms that had any (legal or illegal) Brazilian Amazon deforestation past a cutoff date of 2008.[1] After the moratorium, Amazon forest annual loss rates declined by over 80%, with a quarter of that reduction being directly attributable to the moratorium alone; this represents an aggregate approximate 3.2 million ha of land over the period 2008-2025.[2] From 2006 to 2023, 97.6% of Amazon deforestation was not associated with soy, despite a 4x growth in soy area in the biome.[3] It was hailed by many civil society groups as vital for slowing deforestation.[4]
Threats
In late 2024, the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso passed a law removing tax benefits from companies who make agreements that restrict purchases from legally allowed deforestation; farms that have illegal deforestation can only have the subset of crop produced on the illegally cleared land embargoed, not the farm as a whole.[5] The law was challenged in Brazil's supreme court, and was suspended while litigation proceeded.[6] Brazil's antitrust regulator, CADE, then decreed in late September 2025 that the soy moratorium would be suspended, with the suspension taking effect on 1 January 2026.[7][8] Civil society organizations have warned that this could place an area about the size of Portugal at risk for clearing and have devastating climate and ecological impacts.[9]