INVESTIGATION. From Brazil to France, how deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is impacting our plates

COP30 opened on Monday, November 10 on one of the world’s most striking examples of deforestation. This year, COP30 brought together 191 countries in Belém, Brazil, to try to salvage the fight against global warming. The conference will primarily discuss tropical forests, and in particular the fate of the Amazon, which is the victim of massive deforestation.

One of the main reasons: soybean cultivation. These fields have replaced the natural vegetation of the Amazon rainforest as far as the eye can see. This happened in Paragominas, a city the size of Slovenia and where a quarter of its forests were cut down for livestock and crops between the 1960s and the late 2000s. This equates to almost 16 times the surface area of ​​Paris now devoted to soybeans.

Indigenous communities are of course the ones who voice the most opinions regarding deforestation. Like the Tembé people, they live in a village in a nature reserve near Paragominas. “My grandmother, she already told us“, recalls Santine, 72 years old. The wife of the village chief’s cacique explains: “When we went into the forest, I always asked her: ‘Grandma, what is that sound, the screams of the trees up there?’ He said: ‘It is nature that complains, it is the forest that feels the pain of what is about to happen. The forest will soon be destroyed. What my grandmother said happened…“

So much so that the local climate has changed. Without forests, conditions become drier and hotter, threatening the village’s crops and worrying Lucivania. “Previously, even when the weather was very hot, there was a wonderful breeze that the forest offered us. This provides enormous benefits for us. And today, we breathe this hot air and we feel that even inside us, when we breathe, our breath remains hot and polluted.“, said Lucivania, in front of her small house with a leaf roof.

“I planted cassava, it’s very beautiful because every afternoon I water it. But if I only relied on nature, there would be no rain to irrigate my plants.”

Lucivania, member of the Tembé tribe

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In this village, barely a drop of water has fallen for weeks, which is rare, even in the dry season. This village also suffers from massive spraying of pesticides from soybean cultivation into the air. Noemia’s face hardened as she brought up the topic. “Everything is contaminatedhe exclaimed. The water is polluted, our food… When planes pass by and release toxins, many plants die. Agave, cashew nuts, even fish died, and we saw many of them floating in the river. This makes you angry because forests are very important to us.“

Daily life changes drastically for people who have been living in the forest and come into contact with a very different world: the world of soybean producers. Basilio is precisely what we call “sojero“. A rare testimony, but franceinfo was able to meet him. In his villa with perfect lawns and flowering trees, located in the middle of his fields, he points out the obvious: without his soybeans, there is nothing to feed our livestock in France.

“Soybeans are the basic ingredient of all our food. Without soybeans the costs would be very expensive, we would not be able to survive“, said Basilio. He defended his production that helped lift Paragominas out of poverty. In the late 1990s, the city was called “Paragomibal“, like a gun bullet, because of insecurity. So it’s like this sojero emphasized, agriculture saved the region: “When I arrived at Paragomnias by bus, when I got off there, there was no asphalt“.

“There was mud, mud and more mud. Schools, hotels were a complete disaster.”

Basilio, soybean producer

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But with soybean cultivation, everything changed, he explained. “Now look at this city: good restaurants, good hotels… Schools, hospitals have improved a lot. There are more jobs, there are more agricultural suppliers and we can even buy beer now“, Basilio boasts. Regarding pesticides, he attempts, for example with bacteria, to replace certain chemicals. However, two small planes are parked on his land, to spray his fields with glyphosate and get rid of weeds.

The soybeans produced by Basilio and his colleagues from Brazil can be found in French dishes. Our supermarket shelves may be full of French chicken sandwiches or slices of ham from pigs raised in Brittany, but deforestation in Brazil is hidden behind these products. French livestock, especially chickens and pigs, are mostly fed Brazilian soybean meal.

More than two million tonnes of soybeans are imported annually to France, which has become heavily dependent on this crop and is gradually eating away at the Amazon rainforest. Without these soybeans, there would be no food for our livestock and therefore there would be no triangle sandwiches, or packs of sliced ​​ham. If there are not many details on a product’s label or there is no organic label, this is generally caused by animals being fed these Brazilian soybeans.

Today, France cannot survive without Brazilian soybeans, as they represent 60% of the soybeans we import to feed our livestock. And in Brazil, the prospects for better culture remain complicated: Brazilian producers are also trapped, driven by the laws of the market to use all these pesticides.

“Only sell what produces at the lowest price“, says René Poccard, researcher at CIRAD, a center for international cooperation in agricultural research. He is working in Paragominas to try to improve practices, but notes that the most profitable producers are “companies that encourage the use of chemicals in large quantities in order to use less labor, to get higher yields so that in the end, tons of soybeans are sold at a cheaper price.“.

René Poccard concludes: “This very liberal market is responsible for this destruction and pollution.“. The solution could come from the handful of traders who run the market. In 2008, they approved a moratorium on soybeans and banned the sale of nuts produced in deforested Amazon lands after that date. But when it comes to older crops, the trade will thrive even on our plates.

Even though this year COP30 is close to soybean plantations, COP30 will not be able to change this problem. On the other hand, this should enable progress in the protection of tropical forests. Brazilian President Lula has launched an unprecedented fund to preserve their forests: 5 billion dollars has been raised with a target of 100 billion dollars, which will go to developing countries that protect their forests.

These areas are not only habitats of extraordinary biodiversity, but are also valuable allies in the fight against global warming. Jungles like the Amazon are “carbon absorber“: they captured seven billion tons of CO₂ every year, more than 12 times our country’s annual emissions.