In May, China responded to Trump’s trade war provocations by halting imports of U.S.-grown soybeans, turning to Brazilian and Argentinian suppliers. Given that just over half of all American soybeans produced in 2024 were destined for China, the resultant cratering of demand was “a massive shock to our markets,” a University of Nebraska agricultural economics professor told ABC News. “I hope China will quickly quadruple its soybean orders,” Trump posted on Truth Social in August. But quadruple zero is still zero. 

China’s decision was not only bad for the American agriculture industry; it will also place increased pressure on some of the world’s most important ecosystems. Over the past thirty years, soy production rates — largely fueled by growing demand for livestock feed and biofuel — have exploded in the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado savanna, and the Gran Chaco dry forest, all of which are carbon-rich and biodiverse ecosystems that play critical roles in modulating global weather patterns. Brazil grew nearly 152 million tons of soy in 2023, generating $53 billion in export revenue and accounting for sixteen percent of the country’s total exports that year — a number likely to increase with China’s additional purchases. But with more soy farming comes more danger for these delicate ecosystems. Brazil’s soy-related deforestation increased by 25 percent between 2020 and 2022. In the Cerrado biome, soy-linked deforestation converted 375,000 hectares — an area more than double the size of the state of São Paulo — into agricultural land in 2022 alone.

For years, global conservation organizations have tried to reverse this dynamic, sometimes with real success. In May 2006, Greenpeace released a report outlining the scale of deforestation in the Amazon, condemning “soya’s invasion of the region,” and noting that U.S. agribusiness giants Cargill, Bunge, and Archer-Daniels-Midland collectively controlled the trade of about sixty percent of soy produced in Brazil. Three months later, those companies, along with several others, agreed to the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), a voluntary commitment to forgo purchasing soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. Before the ASM went into effect, thirty percent of soy cultivation in the Amazon came from newly deforested lands; by 2013, that number had dropped to just one percent. 

It may sound backward for agribusiness giants to have backed an environmental cause, but the forest itself plays an important role in the business of soy production. Deforestation increases the risk of droughts and heat waves, which impact crop yields. Losing additional forest means losing profits in the long run. And luckily for the soy traders, supporting the ASM did not require a compromise between short and long-term profits. In fact, since 2006, soy production in the Amazon has more than tripled — cultivated on land that had already been cleared for cattle and other crops. Deforestation in the Gran Chaco, the second largest forest in South America, has climbed as farmers turn from the protected Amazon and toward areas without constraints like the ASM. This is a phenomenon that scientists and policy wonks call “leakage”: as deforestation slows in one region, production simply moves elsewhere. The same dynamic applies in the case of timber: forest conservation on public lands in the Pacific Northwest has moved logging to other parts of the U.S. and Canada, increasing the overall deforestation of unprotected areas in North America by 84 percent. It’s an endless game of global whack-a-mole in which progress toward reducing deforestation in one area is mostly cancelled out by increased deforestation somewhere else. True, the global rate of deforestation is decreasing — but after years of rampant destruction, the Amazon cannot sustain much more loss before experiencing total collapse, releasing millions of gigatons of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere and destabilizing the regional climate.  

As environmentalists struggle to keep up, their initial gains may soon be reversed. Responding to pressure from Brazil’s farm lobby, the country’s antitrust regulator temporarily suspended the ASM in August, ruling that the group of soy traders participating in the industry-wide agreement amounted to a cartel. While the decision is being challenged in the Brazilian courts, companies are negotiating with regulators in an attempt to preserve the ASM. Meanwhile, some of Brazil’s farmers, who have mounted opposition to the ASM for years, bristle at the idea that any foreign entity can tell them what to do with their land. Running out of cleared land to fill with soy, Brazilian farmers have balked at being asked to undercut their potential profits by leaving forests standing. 

Today, record profits stand to be made. China’s interest in purchasing soy from Brazil seems to be growing; though its large state-owned agribusiness company COFCO bought three cargo-loads of American soybeans ahead of Trump and Xi Jinping’s trade deal, as of early November, Chinese soybean importers have purchased almost seven times as many cargo-loads from Brazil. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that soy production will need to double by 2050 to meet demand. Eighty-five percent of soybeans grown per year globally are processed into meal, serving as the caloric foundation for the billions of livestock raised and slaughtered each year for human consumption. Of the remaining fifteen percent, some soybeans end up as biodiesel. Others can be found in everything from makeup to ice cream. Amid this churn, soy has become so embedded in supply chains that it is no longer just a bean. It is a unit of value. Soy is not eaten so much as it is metabolized — into flesh, profit, and emissions, providing an invisible fuel for the global food system.