RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — In a far-flung slice of the Brazilian Amazon, a potholed highway cuts hundreds of miles through the heart of the rainforest. In its most rudimentary…
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The thick plumes of smoke stretched for miles across this slice of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, blanketing the dense rainforest surrounding it. Soon, they drifted…
As the human population grows, so does our demand for food, and soy is one of the key crops meeting that demand. Found in far more than tofu, soy is…
Two major salmon producers in Norway now have deforestation-free soy supply chains, following no-deforestation commitments made by Brazilian soy suppliers to the European salmon industry, according to new analysis published…
Soybean farming accounts for most of the agrochemicals used in Brazil, and the farming activity concentrated in the state of Mato Grosso is now seeing those chemicals washing downstream to the Pantanal wetlands.
Gårdsand, a Norwegian poultry producer, has developed a new feed recipe that excludes Brazilian soy due to concerns about deforestation risk. According to Rainforest Foundation Norway, an organization that campaigns…
Tropical forests around the world are being destroyed at an alarming rate, even in 2020 when the global economy slowed dramatically during the pandemic. A new report released this week…
Seven years ago, I published a major report for the US think-tank Forest Trends: ‘Consumer Goods and Deforestation’ revealed how international markets for commodities like beef, soy and palm oil…
Forest loss in Brazil’s lush Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area marches on, driven largely by a hunger for beef, emboldened land grabbers, and a lack of law enforcement. Triunfo…
Belgium will ban biofuels made from soy and palm oil from 2022 onward as part of its effort to combat deforestation, said the European nation's Federal Minister of Environment and…
In a far-flung stretch of the Brazilian Amazon, the dense rainforest is slowly giving way to neat rows of oil palm that stretch for miles. Beyond the plantations, a narrow…
A controversial freight railway line that would cut through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon looks set to be approved for construction by the federal government as soon as April,…
Between April and November last year, the government of the Brazilian state of Bahia authorized agribusinesses to collect nearly 2 billion liters (528 million gallons) of water a day.
The native vegetation of Brazil’s vast savanna is rapidly being replaced by plantations and pastures. At risk along with the biome’s grasslands are hundreds of endemic, uniquely adapted reptile species.
The European salmon industry's Brazilian soy product supply chain for feed is set to become deforestation-free. According to the Rainforest Foundation Norway, Brazilian salmon-feed supply growers CJ Selecta, Caramuru and…
Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, have swept through the financial world, building to a collective worth of $6.7 trillion by the second half of 2020. An ETF is a sort of…
It was August 26, 2020. Dirlene Mejía, a park ranger who works in the area around Concepción Lake, a protected area located in eastern Bolivia, had just left for her…
Between 2010 and 2020, South America lost an average of 2.6 million hectares of forest per year, according the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In other…
Brazil’s Ferrovia Paraense (FEPASA) railroad will run from Pará state’s rainforest interior to the Amazon estuary; traditional communities say they haven’t yet been consulted as required by international law.
The advent of the Amazon soy moratorium in 2006 seemed to usher in a new era of hope for ending deforestation for food production in the world’s largest rainforest. From…
A day after Brazil announced 11,000 square kilometers of annual deforestation, France, the EU’s biggest buyer of Brazilian soy flour, announced plans to become more self-sufficient on the commodity.
South America’s French Guiana, a French overseas department, is slated for major new liquid biofuel power stations, fueled by soy plantations that will cause largescale Amazon deforestation, say environmentalists.
Eight French supermarket chains will now require that their suppliers obtain soybeans that were not grown on deforested land, according to the Washington, D.C.-based environmental NGO Mighty Earth. The announcement…
Almost a fifth of Brazil’s soy and grains already flow down Amazonia’s rivers. Now a boom in private river port construction, with little government oversight, further threatens the region’s waterways.
Some of the world’s biggest banks have invested US$153.2 billion in forest-risk companies in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and Central and West Africa since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2016.
Georeferencing, a digital process for registering land ownership, is now widespread in South America, but it is high-tech that can be used by landgrabbers and companies to obtain deeds to collective ancestral lands.
Maned wolves, pumas, giant anteaters, tapirs and other Neotropical mammals are threatened with local extinctions unless more conserved areas are established in Brazil’s savanna biome, say scientists.
Reports show that BASF, Bayer and Syngenta take advantage of permissive legislation to reap huge profits from highly hazardous pesticides banned in Europe.
For two years, regions of Brazil that depend on precipitation fed by Amazonian vegetation have seen rainfall below historical averages, impacting crops and harvests. A recent bulletin from a federal agency points to agribusiness itself as one of the drivers of this pattern.
This story is a collaboration between La Nación and Mongabay Latam. It is the fifth installment of a five-part series on illegal deforestation for marijuana production in eastern Paraguay. Read…
