Brazil’s antitrust regulator suspended a key mechanism for rainforest protection, the Amazon Soy Moratorium, on Aug. 18, less than three months before the nation hosts the COP30 climate summit.

The Amazon Soy Moratorium is a 19-year-old voluntary private-sector agreement to not source soybeans from areas deforested after 2008 in the Brazilian Amazon. It is estimated to have kept at least 18,000 square kilometers (6,950 square miles) of rainforest standing.

Environmental NGOs, including Greenpeace Brazil and Imaflora, warn that suspending the soy moratorium could put huge areas of the Amazon rainforest at risk of being deforested and replaced with soy farms.

“Dismantling an effective, internationally recognized agreement built over nearly twenty years, in the name of unchecked deforestation, would be a shot in the foot,” Cristiane Mazzetti, Greenpeace Brazil’s forest coordinator, said in a statement. “It opens the way for soy to become a major vector of Amazon deforestation, burying Brazil’s chances of meeting its climate targets.”

Brazil’s federal antitrust agency, the Administrative Council for Economic Defence (CADE), issued the suspension. It asked moratorium members — including multinational commodity giants such as Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus and Cofco — to remove all public information about the moratorium, including impact and results, from their websites.

“This kind of behavior sounds much more like a political decision than a technical concern,” João Gonçalves, a senior director at environment nonprofit Mighty Earth, told Mongabay by email. “If this political decision isn’t reversed quickly, it will cost the Amazon dearly.”

Gonçalves warned that each day the soy moratorium remains suspended during CADE’s investigation, the risk to the Amazon increases — adding that the probe could last for years.

The move was initiated by petition from a chapter of Aprosoja, a soy industry lobby group, in December 2024. It claimed that the Amazon soy moratorium imposed restrictions beyond Brazilian law and cost the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s biggest soybean-growing state, an estimated 20 billion reais ($3.7 billion) in annual losses.

Before the soy moratorium in 2006, 30% of soy expansion resulted in deforestation, by 2013 that number dropped to just 1%. Farmers instead planted on already deforested land and increased soy production even as deforestation dropped.  Brazil is now the world’s largest soy exporter, and the pact is credited for boosting acceptance of Brazilian soy in global markets.

“At this critical crossroads months before the climate COP in the Amazon, Brazil must decide whether to align its agribusiness sector with global sustainability standards or risk sacrificing long-term planetary health for short-term economic interests,” Mighty Earth’s Gonçalves added. “Will it choose to protect the Amazon or allow it to be traded away?”

Banner image: Soy fields in the southern Brazilian Amazon. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.