The humble soybean is in the middle of a geopolitical tangle that spans three continents and threatens to devour the world’s largest tropical savanna.
At issue is China’s enormous appetite for soybeans, millions of tons a year, mainly for cooking oil and livestock feed.
Sating that demand has taken a grave toll in recent years on the forests and grasslands of Brazil, China’s biggest supplier. That stands to get worse in the coming months, because China has all but stopped buying American soybeans, giving Brazilian farmers greater incentives to expand into new areas to grow soy.
Earlier this year, the government in Beijing slapped a hefty tariff on American soybeans in retaliation for hefty U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Until then, America had been China’s second-biggest supplier. But now, farmers in the United States have sold not a single bushel to China from this fall’s harvest. Hopes of a relief package from the White House have been delayed by the government shutdown.
Likewise Argentina, whose president, Javier Milei, met with President Trump on Tuesday. Argentina sold a mountain of soybeans to China this year after American farmers were locked out.
But no country stands to gain as much as Brazil, the world’s biggest soybean exporter. No surprise then that its powerful farm lobby is pushing to dismantle one of the most important industrywide measures, known as the Soy Moratorium and designed to limit deforestation in Brazil’s most famous biome, the Amazon.
All of this is awkward for Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He is hosting the next round of international climate negotiations in November, in the Amazon rainforest city of Belém. His administration has pledged to get deforestation under control.
“The government is facing a very difficult situation,” Cristiane Mazzetti, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace Brazil, said in an interview. “There is an attack on one of the most important mechanisms for zero deforestation.”
Soybeans are Brazil’s biggest agricultural export. Its soy production has steadily risen over the past several decades. But it really accelerated in the past 10 years, as relations soured between Beijing and Washington, and China went looking for soybeans beyond the American Midwest. By 2017, at the start of the first Trump term, Brazil had overtaken the United States as the world’s leading soybean producer.
Now, relations between Beijing and Washington have sunk to a new low, and American farmers stand to lose their biggest global customer. For much of the past year, prices have been around $10 a bushel, down from $13 or so at the start of 2024.
“We’ve had strong growth in recent years, starting with that first U.S.-China trade war. And now, with the second one,” Lucas Costa Beber, vice president of Aprosoja, the Brazilian Association of Soybean Producers, said this week. “In the long term, if this situation continues, opportunities for Brazil will increase.”
The prognosis for Brazil’s biosphere is less rosy.
Soy plantations tend to come up on land that had been logged and cleared previously for cattle grazing.
Today, soy plantations cover 40 million hectares, about 14 percent of the country’s agricultural land, according to MapBiomas, an independent group that uses satellite data. Most of that is in the Cerrado, a vast region of tropical savanna and forest corridors that is less a global celebrity than the Amazon but still a critical ecosystem for Brazil.
In the Cerrado lie the headwaters of the country’s biggest river basins, and it is vital to regulating rainfall patterns and temperatures. Deforestation has declined in the past year, as the administration of Mr. Lula has tightened enforcement. But nearly half of the native vegetation of the Cerrado has vanished, making way for cattle grazing and soy plantations.
“The Cerrado is disappearing,” said Luciana Gatti, a climate change researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. And now, she said, “the pressure to produce soybeans to export to China will be bigger.”
In 2023 alone, soy was harvested from more than 460,000 hectares of recently deforested land in the Cerrado, according to Trase, a nonprofit group that tracks deforestation in agricultural supply chains. That is an area bigger than Rhode Island.
The Cerrado is not part of the Amazon. Soy-related deforestation hasn’t been eradicated entirely in the Amazon itself, independent researchers say, but it has been slowed significantly by the Soy Moratorium. Under that industry pact, which applies only in the Amazon region, the world’s major commodity traders jointly agreed to not buy or finance soy grown on lands that were deforested after 2008.
Partly as a result, in 2023, soy harvest in the Amazon came from 150,000 hectares of recently deforested land, according to Trase figures, a far smaller area than in the Cerrado.
Now, pressure is mounting to suspend the Soy Moratorium in the Amazon. In August, Brazil’s national antitrust regulator briefly suspended it while the agency opened an investigation into alleged collusion among traders. A federal court immediately reinstated the moratorium, but its future remains uncertain.
The soy producers’ association is leading the charge against the moratorium. Mr. Beber, the group’s vice president, called it a “trade barrier disguised as environmental protection.” He said the moratorium effectively favored other countries by regulating which Brazilian soybeans can be traded on the world market.
Mr. Beber said farmers could vastly expand soy production in areas of the Cerrado that are currently pasture lands. “All of those regions have degraded pastureland with potential to be converted into cropland,” he said. “It really just depends on economic and market viability.”
The market viability for American soy farmers is murky.
Soybeans are the top U.S. agricultural export. The American Soybean Association has said American farmers risk losing their main customer, China, which brought in more than $12.6 billion last year, if the trade dispute continues. Meanwhile, tariffs on China have pushed up the costs of fertilizer and equipment in the United States.
Mr. Trump has swung wildly on whether he intends to meet with Mr. Xi at the end of the month at a trade summit in South Korea. If they meet, soybeans are sure to be on the agenda.
Flávia Milhorance and Claire Brown contributed reporting.
Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
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