Brazil will lose international trading partners if new president Lula da Silva doesn’t act quickly on Amazon deforestation, environmental campaigners have claimed.
New president da Silva was sworn in this week with a strong commitment to combatting illegal deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
One of his first moves was to restore the authority of the government’s environmental protection agency to tackle deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado regions, two of the world’s largest soy and beef sourcing areas.
British supermarkets and food companies watch Brazil closely. More than half of the UK’s soy imports each year come from Brazil, according to the Stockholm Environment Institute, and there is widespread concern about the direction Brazil has taken in recent years on environmental issues.
With new UK and EU laws moving forward to ban imports of goods linked to illegal deforestation, there are warnings that Brazil must move quickly to maintain its trade.
“The Brazilian government and agribusiness sector need to realise the country will start losing international markets if they don’t change course quickly,” said Rubens Carvalho, Earthsight head of deforestation research.
“It also needs to propose and implement solutions to bring about enhanced and mandatory traceability in the cattle and soy sectors.”
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He said new anti-deforestation regulations being introduced in the UK, Europe and US – which will force food industry companies to conduct strict due diligence when trading key commodities such as soy, cattle, cocoa and palm oil – should “serve as a wake-up call to large beef, leather and soy exporters in Brazil”.
“Once these regulations come into force, businesses in large consumer markets, including the UK, will need to have confidence that the new Brazilian government is seriously tackling illegality and lack of traceability for them to continue to source from certain areas in Brazil.”
WWF UK said there was “still a long way to go” before restoring balance in key Brazilian sourcing regions, but that da Silva’s new government appeared to be focusing on “the urgent protection they so desperately need to move away from tipping point, not towards it”.
Bel Lyon, senior advisor for WWF Latin America said: “Lula’s promise to promote technological solutions to increase agricultural productivity without any further deforestation will both protect nature and deliver economic growth and trade for Brazil.”
Under da Silva’s predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation rose 60% over the previous four years, the largest percentage rise under a presidency since satellite monitoring began in 1998, according to analysis by the Climate Observatory.
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