Brazil soy lobby defends modernization of soy moratorium

By Ana Mano

SAO PAULO, April 23 (Reuters) - A case pending before Brazil's Supreme Court gives the soy industry a chance to improve the "soy moratorium," an agreement that banned purchases of the oilseed from deforested Amazon areas after a cutoff date in 2008, said Andre Nassar, head of Brazil's soybean traders lobby Abiove, on Wednesday.

Speaking before the Senate's agriculture committee, Nassar cited a Supreme Court case that will determine if a law passed by Mato Grosso state removing tax incentives for signatories of the soy moratorium is constitutional.

"The solution is not to end the moratorium. Nor to keep it the way it is," he told legislators and groups representing farmers who want to end the moratorium. "Something different has to be done."

Conservationists and scientists have praised the soy moratorium for slowing deforestation in the Amazon. But the voluntary agreement has been under growing pressure from farmers lobbies interested in expanding plantings to meet rising demand for the soy produced in Brazil, the world's largest exporter.

"We propose that the moratorium ceases to be an imposition and becomes an option for farmers," Fabricio Rosa, president of national soy and corn farmers' lobby Aprosoja Brasil, told the committee. "There are farmers who opened up their properties (to plant soy) before 2008 and who could comply with the non-deforestation requirements."

Abiove has defended the soy moratorium, previously saying it strove to balance the demands of farmers and consumers. However, it conceded in December that state lawmakers including from Mato Grosso have pushed legislation that would "significantly harm" the moratorium signatories.

The moratorium is enforced by a working group including representatives of trading companies, environmental advocacy groups and the government.

In meetings of that group, Greenpeace said grain traders had proposed changing the moratorium rules to distinguish between individual soy fields, letting growers export from one part of a farm while planting soy on newly deforested areas nearby. That proposal was never adopted.

The soybean planting area in the Amazon biome has grown exponentially to 7.8 million hectares (19.274 million acres) in the 2023/2024 soy season from 300,000 hectares (741,316 acres) 25 years ago, Nassar said.

The expansion, despite soy moratorium rules, has benefited soybean farmers and the industry, he claimed.

"Thank heavens," Nassar said. "The soy moratorium allowed it to happen. It created a market for this soy."