- Driven by the tariff war between the U.S. and China, soy production in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state is breaking records and encroaching on the Cerrado biome.
- Logistics projects such as the Ferrogrão railroad are expected to scale up production, further increasing the risk of deforestation.
- In the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land, amid still-standing Cerrado, Indigenous peoples are already feeling the impacts of pesticides and dams.
MATO GROSSO, Brazil — In 2025, soy farmers in Brazil saw a new boost caused by the tariff war between the United States and China. Brazilian soy exports to the Chinese market reached a record high: 85.4 million metric tons, almost 80% of total soy shipments.
In Mato Grosso, soy production had already seen a boost in 2019, partly due to trade tensions between the Chinese and the first U.S. President Donald Trump administration. In addition to China’s demand for the product, new agricultural frontiers were opened for soy farmers after the BR-163 federal road was paved, connecting them to ports in Pará state. Since then, soy plantations in Mato Grosso have increased by 3.4 million hectares (8.4 million acres), according to Brazil’s National Supply Company (CONAB), while their output went from 33 million metric tons in the 2018-19 harvest to 51 million metric tons in 2024-25 – a 54.5% increase.
Soy plantations are advancing mainly in the Cerrado, the most biodiverse savanna on the planet, which is essential to Brazil’s water supply, since its sources provide it to eight of the country’s 12 hydrographic regions.
In the Juruena River Basin, in western Mato Grosso, consolidation of monocultures — not only soy but also corn and cotton — is a matter of concern to people in the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land. They report that the surrounding farms have been contaminating water bodies, plants and fruit with pesticides and are blocking the rivers with small hydroelectric plants.
Located between the Buriti and Papagaio rivers, the 131,000-hectare (324,000 acres) Indigenous land is home to 244 members of the Terena, Nambikwara, Manoki and Rikbaktsa ethnic groups. The territory covers one-tenth of the area of Sapezal, a municipality with Brazil’s third-highest agricultural production value in 2024.
“The Cerrado suffers major threats because it’s not seen as a source of natural life,” says Cleide Terena, a leader of the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land and the president of Thutalinãnsu, an association that gathers women from the four Indigenous peoples living in the territory. “This is where we get our nourishment, our medicine, our food.”
The Juruena is one of the tributaries of the Amazon’s Tapajós River, and its basin covers 19 million hectares (47 million acres). Its main course runs for 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles), fed by tributaries with crystal-clear and fast-flowing waters. “In terms of territorial extension, it’s the largest [basin] in Mato Grosso and accounts for more than 60% of the water that drains into the Tapajós, so it’s very important for the Amazon and the Cerrado,” says Andreia Fanzeres, coordinator of the Indigenous Rights Program at NGO Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN), a member of the Juruena Vivo Network.
She points out that this basin is sacred to 10 Indigenous peoples from 21 territories, but “the predominance of soy, corn and cotton crops is quite visible compared to Cerrado areas, which are now mostly restricted to Indigenous lands.”
According to MapBiomas, 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of vegetation were converted to farming in the Higher Juruena area from 1985 to 2024, and now farms cover almost a third of the basin. “When I was a child, not all the places around our territory were deforested. Today, only our forest remains,” says Cleide, who was born in the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land and lives in the Serra Azul village, which is bathed by the Buriti River.
New frontiers
According to CONAB, soy plantations in Mato Grosso increased from 9.7 million hectares (24 million acres) in 2019 to 13.1 million (32.4 million acres) this year. Record production in the 2024-25 harvest accounted for almost a third of the 171.4 million metric tons of the national harvest.
The state’s main production hub is its mid-north region, which includes the municipalities along BR-163, in the Amazonian portion of the state. New agricultural frontiers have emerged in the far north, in the valleys of the Araguaia and Guaporé rivers, which run from the Cerrado to the Amazon, and in the west, where the Juruena basin is located.
According to a projection made by the Mato Grosso Institute of Agricultural Economics (IMEA), a private nonprofit organization, the state will have 16.6 million hectares (41 million acres) of soy fields in the 2033-34 harvest, producing 64.5 million metric tons. “All these rather marginal areas, which used to lack logistics corridors, have expanded as a result of economic viability in recent years,” says Lucas Beber, president of the Mato Grosso chapter of the Brazilian Association of Soy Producers (Aprosoja).
The tension in trade relations between the United States and China worsened in February 2025, when more tariffs were successively imposed. In April, China announced retaliation and taxed imports from the U.S., including soy, at 34%. The Asian country zeroed out purchases from American soy farmers, and Brazil’s stocks were enough to meet the new demand. “The first trade war enabled the expansion of the plantation area, and the second one has been keeping Brazilian exports strong,” Beber says. Mato Grosso accounted for 30% of the soy exported by the country in 2025, or 32 million metric tons.
In October, the U.S. and China announced a truce. According to the White House, the Chinese committed to buying 12 million metric tons of soy this year, in addition to 25 million metric tons every year until 2028. But China maintained its tariff on U.S. soy at 13%.
Brazilian producers remain optimistic. “Even if there is an agreement, I believe that China will always favor Brazilian soy because of the insecurity and instability in negotiations with the United States,” Beber says.
During the tariff standoff, Beber continues, large U.S. multinationals such as Bunge, Cargill and ADM suspended purchases of soy from the U.S. but maintained exports to China using Brazilian product rated at a zero tariff.
According to the Trase platform, which monitors commodity supply chains in several countries, Cargill, Bunge and ADM are Brazil’s main soy exporters, having accounted for 35.6% of total exports in 2022. Almost half of the 33.4 million metric tons exported by the three companies went to China.
Indigenous crops
In Mato Grosso, large-scale soy cultivation is not limited to big farms. In November, during COP30, Brazil’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock Carlos Fávaro celebrated the operating license for mechanized soy plantations granted to Copihanama, a cooperative formed by members of the Haliti-Paresi, Nambikwara and Manoki Indigenous peoples. The authorization, unprecedented in Indigenous territories, had been given by Ibama, Brazil’s environmental agency, in the previous month. The agency confirmed the information.
Based in the municipality of Campo Novo do Parecis, near Sapezal, Copihanama manages 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of soy crops on Indigenous territories in the state, including Tirecatinga.The history of agricultural occupation in the region, known as Chapada dos Parecis, helps to understand the relationship of some Native peoples with commodity production. In the 1940s, Jesuit missionaries settled in the Tirecatinga area and attracted people from several Indigenous groups. When they left the territory in the early 1970s, not all Indigenous peoples were able to return to their original places because settlers from southern Brazil had already advanced with monocultures over Mato Grosso’s Cerrado.
In the late 1970s, when Geraldo Terena and other Indigenous leaders organized to set the boundaries of Tirecatinga, the atmosphere was one of violence, but he notes that the tension eased after those boundaries were set in 1983.
Before that, in the 1940s and 1950s, rubber extraction was the main source of income at Tirecatinga. The industry later underwent a crisis, and many of its residents went to work on neighboring farms.
A new alternative source of income for Tirecatinga would only emerge in 2004, when they decided to plant soy in a 1,120-hectare (2,770-acre) area, using mechanized agriculture. “The plantation is far from the water source, from the area where straw is collected, and from where wild fruit is gathered. We planted it in a very strategic spot, guided by the elders,” says Ademil Iamexi, a member of the Manoki ethnic group who is the head of soy production at Tirecatinga.
At first, the Indigenous people partnered with farmers from neighboring municipalities, who provided “inputs — seeds, fertilizer, fuel — and machinery, and we contributed the labor and the land,” Ademil says. Then the farmers would buy the product. Planting also took place in neighboring areas in the Utiariti and Paresi Indigenous lands. Together, the three territories make up a corridor of 1.1 million hectares (2.7 million acres) of Cerrado.
But soon they had to sign Conduct Adjustment Commitments (Termos de Ajustamento de Conduta, TAC, administrative agreements to regulate behavior) with Funai (Brazil’s Indigenous agency), Ibama and the Public Prosecution Service. In 2018, under Law 11460, Ibama imposed at least 59 million reais ($11.5 million) in fines on farmers and 2 million reais ($388,000) on Indigenous associations for planting transgenic soy on Indigenous Lands. The Indigenous producers negotiated lower fines and adapted to the conditions imposed by the environmental agency.
The agreement’s required adjustments included conducting environmental studies and mapping water sources. It also stressed that the federal Constitution says that only Indigenous peoples can practice agriculture in Indigenous lands. In 2019, a cooperative was created to market the product.
At Tirecatinga, residents plant soy in the first harvest and corn in the second harvest, with average incomes of 300,000-800,000 reais ($97,000-$155,000) per year, respectively. Profits are distributed among the residents. According to Ademil, each individual receives up to 2,000 reais ($388) per year from the soy harvest. Corn revenue is distributed by village and yields 20,000-40,000 reais ($3,880-$7,770) for each village, depending on the population.
With the Ibama license, Ademil points out that Copihanama will be eligible for loans at lower interest rates under the federal government’s harvest plan, to acquire machinery and infrastructure. Today they have to rent equipment from farmers. Even so, Indigenous territories should not expand their activities even when the market is heated, Ademil says. “There hasn’t been an inch of expansion here since 2004. Our production will remain at 50,000 sacks of soybeans and 40,000 of corn.”
Ferrogrão: Promise and disagreement
Mato Grosso’s soy production is mainly transported to the ports of Santos, São Paulo; Barcarena, Pará; and Manaus, Amazonas — always through the BR-364 federal road and the Madeira River waterway — as well as to Santarém, Pará, through BR-163. Despite the various routes, Lucas Beber from Aprosoja MT sees rail freight as the state’s main bottleneck.
To solve the problem, the agribusiness sector is counting on the Ferrogrão railroad, which is highly controversial among environmentalists and Indigenous peoples. Devised in 2016 by ADM, Amaggi, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, it should follow the 933-km (580-mi) BR-163 route inside the Amazon from Sinop, in Mato Grosso, to the Miritituba district, in the municipality of Itaituba, Pará.
Ferrogrão will be able to move up to 65 million metric tons of soybeans and corn per year. According to the agribusiness sector, this would encourage competitiveness and save 8 billion reais ($1.6 billion) per year in grain transportation. Aprosoja expects the railroad to be the mode of transport used to move half of Mato Grosso’s soy.
The project is currently under study by the National Land Transport Agency (ANTT). It awaits a Supreme Court ruling on a 862-hectare (2,130-acre) reduction in the Jamanxim National Park, in the Amazon region of Pará, which the construction works would deforest. In October, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes voted in favor of the change and was joined by Justice Luís Roberto Barroso.
Justice Moraes’ vote also incorporated a proposal by Justice Barroso to add up to 51,100 hectares (126,000 acres) to the national park as environmental compensation. Also in October, Justice Flávio Dino requested to review the case, thus suspending the proceedings, which were resumed last February. Ibama is awaiting the final ruling to continue with the environmental licensing process. ANTT, in turn, plans to forward the study to the Federal Court of Accounts for analysis. The Ministry of Transport scheduled the auction for September 2026.
On the eve of COP30, Indigenous peoples, Quilombola communities, riverfolk and small farmers traveled the “Soy Route” from Sinop to Belém to protest against agribusiness infrastructure projects such as the Ferrogrão railroad, which they see as drivers of deforestation, pollution and land conflicts. “We are leaving a place where soy is grown to show that the impact does not end here. What begins in the Cerrado destroys rivers and ways of life in the Lower Tapajós,” says Vivi Borari, a communicator and member of the Tapajós Vivo movement.
Days later, 300 Indigenous people and representatives of social movements occupied grain barges in the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve area, in Santarém. Alessandra Korap, a leader of the Munduruku Indigenous Land, protested, “It is a contradiction that the government talks about climate commitments in Belém while advancing a railroad designed to lower the cost of soy exports, expanding ports on the Tapajós River and pressuring our lands.”
OPAN’s Andreia Fanzeres observes that the Indigenous peoples of Mato Grosso support the protests against the Ferrogrão railroad because of the threats to the Tapajós and Xingu river basins. However, uncertainties remain about how the railroad would affect the state’s Cerrado. “I imagine that if a new transportation route emerges that expands production possibilities, there will be a rush precisely to the Juruena basin region,” she says.
Vulnerable Cerrado
Lucas Beber from Aprosoja MT argues that deforesting new areas to meet increased demand and transportation capacity will not be necessary, as soy plantations have expanded mainly over pastureland. “Mato Grosso could easily convert over 5.5 million hectares [13.6 million acres] of livestock areas [to soy] overnight, but that is not economically viable yet,” he says.
Beber also points out that the Forest Code requires rural properties in the state to maintain so-called legal reserves — 80% of the area on properties in the Amazon, and 35% in the Cerrado — in addition to permanent protection areas in riparian forests.
While CONAB reports that soy plantations in Mato Grosso expanded by 3.4 million hectares (8.4 million acres) from 2019-25, the National Institute for Space Research recorded 470,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of deforestation in the state’s Cerrado areas and 1.2 million in the Amazon. Livestock, in turn, remained at approximately 20 million hectares (49.4 million acres) from 2019-24, according to MapBiomas. For Paula Bernasconi, South America engagement lead at Trase, this means pastures are migrating to new areas as a result of the advance of soy farming, resulting in more deforestation associated with that expansion. “Every year, soy drives the conversion of a huge amount of forest and vegetation into pastureland,” she says.
According to Trase, Brazil’s soy supply chain was connected to the deforestation of nearly 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of native vegetation in 2022. At least 260,000 hectares (642,000 acres) were in the Cerrado, mainly in the so called Matopiba region, an agricultural frontier composed of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, and in Mato Grosso.
Trase analyzes regional deforestation data to identify how much has been converted to a particular commodity such as soy. The platform then takes into account supply chain patterns to identify potential risks of companies’ production being exposed to vegetation suppression.
According to them, U.S. companies Bunge (77,700 hectares or 192,000 acres), Cargill (55,000 hectares or 136,000 acres) and ADM (39,000 hectares or 96,000 acres); China’s Cofco (67,800 hectares or 167,500 acres); and Brazil’s NovaAgri (46,000 hectares or 113,700 acres) are the exporting groups with the highest risk of being linked to deforestation.
According to the executive director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute André Guimarães, higher demand could increase pressure on forests and native vegetation. “Today, deforestation works against our future production capacity. Even if demand increases, this growth has to happen in new ways: intensification of production, pasture renovation, replacement of pasture with crops, crop-livestock-forestry integration.”
While the Cerrado concentrates the expansion of soy plantations, it is not covered by protection instruments such as the Soy Moratorium, an agreement under which the main traders commit to not buying product from Amazon areas deforested after 2008. In Bernasconi’s view, this type of commitment should be extended to other biomes because “the Cerrado ends up being much more exposed and dependent on the analysis of each company and each individual system.”
The Amazon Rainforest, in turn, may become more exposed, since, in January of this year, large traders such as Cargill, Bunge and ADM announced they were leaving the pact that for 20 years had been successful in controlling deforestation caused by soy in that biome.
Bunge states to Mongabay that the data do not establish a direct link between the farms and the company but rather provide “general geographic information about farms that may directly or indirectly supply any company operating in the area.” Bunge adds that it is committed to zero deforestation in certain areas of South America, and it therefore verifies “the socio-environmental compliance of its suppliers before purchasing and receiving grains.” Furthermore, it adopts a system that, by the end of 2024, according to the company, had achieved “100% traceability and monitoring over its direct and indirect soy purchases from priority areas of the Brazilian Cerrado.”
NovaAgri says it follows “the strictest safety, quality and sustainability standards,” monitors grain production areas and invests in independent auditing.
Cofco International states that it “adopts strict controls when purchasing soy in the country,” with “extensive analysis of deforestation and conversion levels in its soy supply chains, having its processes audited by external companies.” The company says it is committed to eliminating deforestation in its soy and corn supply chains globally.
ADM acknowledges that “deforestation and vegetation conversion are significant challenges for the industry” and that it follows “rigorous, third-party audited standards stated in our Forest, Biodiversity and Community Protection Policy,” and therefore they have increased their “traceability and transparency efforts.”
Cargill did not respond to Mongabay’s contact. Read the companies’ full statements.
According to Trase, 45% of the soy produced in the Cerrado and exported was covered by corporate programs to eliminate deforestation. “It is important that these systems advance in the form of detection and tracking, but also as transparency,” Bernasconi says.
Soy farmers are preparing for the European Union’s Deforestation Act, which will come into effect Dec. 30 of this year for large and medium-sized operators. To enter the European market, the law requires full value chain traceability for commodities such as soy, but it only applies to forest ecosystems. In the Cerrado, the requirement excludes 75.5 million hectares (18.5 million acres) of savanna and grassland areas.
Fear of pesticides
At the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land, residents feel the effects of farming in the surrounding areas — in addition to soy, they plant cotton and corn, mainly during the off-season. Thutalinãnsu president Cleide Terena reports that crop-dusting planes fly over the Serra Azul Indigenous village and dump pesticides on nearby crops.
Thutalinãnsu commissioned research from the Federal University of Mato Grosso and OPAN to understand whether, and to what extent, pesticides affect food, game, fruit, medicinal plants and river water in the Indigenous land. Researchers found residues of 11 different insecticides, fungicides and herbicides in 88% of medicinal and fruit plant samples from the territory.
Based on the analysis published in December 2022, Serra Azul residents decided to stop consuming water from the Buriti River and wait for further studies. They also expect an artesian well to be drilled so they can have water free from contamination risks. In the meantime, they have to buy bottled water in the city of Sapezal, fetch it from other villages that have wells or get it from water trucks. “Today, if I drink water from the river, I get a stomach ache. It’s not that healthy water anymore,” Cleide says.
From the Serra Azul belvedere, a green carpet stretches to the horizon, cut by the winding Buriti River that is illuminated by a red sun. “Here, our Cerrado is rich in diversity of medicinal plants,” says Cleide’s mother, Terezinha Amazokairo. She was born in the area of the Indigenous land in 1964 and graduated in biology to study the traditional use of native plants, at a time when that knowledge was being lost in the territory. “All our plants and fruits near the boundary are contaminated. I go there to pick a root or herb, then I ingest it, and instead of being good for my health, it harms me, causing diarrhea, nausea, headaches,” she says.
On the dirt road that separates the southern part of the Indigenous territory from the farms, one October morning, a machine sprayed pesticides on a field near the Vale do Buriti village, where there is an Indigenous school. “We’re worried. Neighboring farmers apply it, and sometimes they let it run off into the water,” says Ademil, coordinator of soy crops at Tirecatinga.
A resident of the Recanto do Moxi Indigenous village, Ademil consumes water from the crystal-clear Papagaio River. But he is concerned because there are “streams that originate in farms, with crops nearby and cattle on the banks.” He knows that when it rains, “everything goes into the Papagaio and the water becomes very murky.”
Blocked rivers
In the mid-2000s, at the beginning of the global commodities boom, agribusiness corporations began to develop projects for small and medium-sized hydroelectric plants in the Juruena Basin. In the main course of the river, “the construction of a series of dams interrupted the flow and altered fish and fishing dynamics, raising the alarm in late 2008,” says OPAN’s Fanzeres.
The organization has been monitoring dam projects since 2019 as a member of the Juruena Vivo Network. Its October bulletin identified 185 projects within the Juruena basin (123 were planned, 24 were under construction and 38 were operational). “We saw increased pressure on the rivers of the Juruena Basin as agribusiness expanded its production and its frontiers,” explains Fanzeres, a co-author of the report.
In the last six years, the number of small hydroelectric plants — that is, those producing up to 5 MW — in the Juruena Basin has increased from 42 to 88. Since this type of project does not require environmental impact studies and reports, “any impacts they may cause are underestimated and are not subject to any type of compensation,” she notes. According to Fanzeres, the environmental agency should analyze the projects cumulatively rather than individually.
According to OPAN, the biggest concern in the Juruena area is the Papagaio River sub-basin, where 42 dams are planned — the largest number in the basin. The river divides the Tirecatinga and Utiariti Indigenous lands and is fed by the Buriti and Sacre rivers, which separate the areas of Indigenous land from farms. Several projects for the Sacre are advancing at a “very fast pace.” “The rivers that are about to be blocked by a series of dams support ethno-environmental tourism in the region,” Fanzeres says.
On the Buriti, the only medium-sized hydroelectric plant, producing up to 30 MW, installed on a neighboring property has visible impacts, according to residents of the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land. Besides, two other dams are under construction and 14 are planned along the river.
Suyani Terena, Cleide’s daughter and the vice president of Thutalinãnsu, wonders about the future of the Buriti River. “During the dry season, the water level drops significantly, and the rocks become visible. We don’t see the river with the same water levels as before. Today, it’s only full during the rainy season,” she says. “Our concern now is knowing how long the Cerrado will continue to flourish and resist pesticides and dams.”
This report was produced in partnership with Ambiental Media and received support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Banner image: Suyani Terena, vice president of the Thutalinãnsu Indigenous Association, by the Buriti River in the Tirecatinga Indigenous Land. Image by André Dib for Mongabay.
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