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To feed the animals that satisfy Europe’s steadily rising consumption of meat and dairy products in Europe, farmers rely heavily on imported cereals from Latin America, primarily soy. After Brazil, Argentina is the European Union’s second largest supplier of soybean products, covering 21 percent (7.7 million tonnes) of the 27 member states’ total consumption.
In 2023, Europe imported a record amount of Argentine soybean meal. The volume surpassed that of the entire 2012-2022 period, due in part to a surge in imports to Spain (according to Eurostat data for the year to September 2023). Because of its high protein value, soy accounts for up to 25 percent of the feed given to industrial livestock.
Soy, mostly genetically modified, arrives in the EU already processed into meal or in the form of unprocessed soybeans. Argentina is historically the world’s largest exporter of the processed meal (but Brazil is likely to overtake it in 2023).
The cultivation of soy is devastating for forest ecosystems, likely more so than any other product recently imported to Europe.
The EU is in second place (after China) for soybean imports worldwide (and in third place after China and India for all commodities whose production is responsible for deforestation). Between the soybeans and the processed soy, Europe imported more than 580 million tonnes in the ten years until September 2023.
In particular, the EU is the largest importer of soybeans from Chaco, an ecologically sensitive province of northern Argentina. Chaco exported 356,000 tonnes to Europe in 2019, accounting for more than 50 percent of its total exports. With its major contribution to global demand, Europe has thus prompted producers to deforest large areas of this Argentinian province to make room for soybeans destined as animal feed for meat production.
Chaco is in third place among regions supplying soybeans to the European Union, after Amazonia and Cerrado (in Brazil). These latter areas, however, are mainly oriented towards the Chinese market.
In answer to the disastrous environmental impact of tropical soybean farming, in 2022 the EU passed a new regulation (called EUDR, European Union Deforestation Regulation). This bans the produce of deforested land from entering the European market.
Alas, the ban’s implementation has been postponed until 2025. Together with legal loopholes arising from lobbying by the timber industry and its allies in some EU governments, this has left a number of forests (in Europe and beyond) languishing at the mercy of the profit motive.
And at least one third of Chaco will be excluded from the future European regulation unless its remit is extended to “other forest areas”, as defined in a specific review clause. That is because Chaco (like the Brazilian Cerrado) is in fact a mosaic of forests, savannas and grasslands that do not fall entirely within the FAO’s narrow definition of forest, on which the EUDR is based.
Chaco deforestation: the numbers
The Chaco ecoregion is the second largest forest habitat in South America after the Amazon. It is divided into a dry portion (the largest such habitat in the world) and a wet portion, and totals 110 million hectares. 62 percent of the region is in the eponymous Argentinian province, while the rest stretches into Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. It is home to almost 5,000 different plant and animal species, some of which are at high risk of extinction. Moreover, in order to make room for the soybeans, local people have regularly been expelled from their land by means of intimidation and violence. They include mestizos as well as indigenous peoples such as the Wichí, Pilagá, Qom, Vilela, and Moqoit.
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According to a report published in 2022 by the group Periodistas por el Planeta, coordinated by the Argentinian Marina Aizen, this rampant soy production has cost around 14 million hectares of trees in the Argentinian Chaco over the past 30 years. The deforestation rate for the entire ecoregion (25 percent) exceeds that of the Amazon (17 percent) and is second only to the Cerrado (50 percent).
Besides harming biodiversity, the destruction of the Chaco forest is having an impact on global warming, as the felled trees no longer absorb carbon dioxide. Deforestation, which accounts for about 15 percent of Argentina’s CO2 emissions, is the source of about 10 percent of planetary emissions. That is two thirds of all transport (land, sea and air) combined.
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According to estimates by the think tank Planet Tracker, deforestation in the Chaco attributable to EU-imported soy caused the release of 7.3 million tonnes of CO2 in 2018 alone.
Data from Trase, a platform for monitoring the sustainability of agricultural commodities, shows that 95 percent of deforestation in Argentina has been in the Chaco (the only ecosystem for which accurate measurements exist). This land accounted for 10 and 4 percent, respectively, of Argentina’s annual soybean production (6.6-8.9 million tonnes) and exports (over 2 million tonnes) in the 2015-2019 period (the most recent data available).
“During the same period, annual deforestation in Chaco increased from 116,000 to 211,000 hectares”, points out Michael Lathuillière, a researc…