US-China trade war ‘imperils’ Amazon forest, experts warn
- Surge in soybean farming in Brazil expected if trade war drags on too long, as rainforest destruction may be required to make room for more crops
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The simmering trade war between the United States and China risks devastating the Amazon rainforest as Beijing looks for ways to make up a shortfall in US-grown soybeans, experts warned on Wednesday.
Over the last eight months, the US and China have slapped tariffs on more than US$360 billion in two-way goods trade, weighing on the manufacturing sectors in both countries.
One US export especially hard hit by the tit-for-tat measures has been soybeans, most of which are used for animal feed.
Chinese imports of US soya products “basically collapsed to zero” at the end of 2018, according to the authors of an article in the journal Nature on how the trade war may unexpectedly affect Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
Due to China’s insatiable demand for meat products and its reliance on imported soybeans to feed its livestock, the authors said Brazil would need to take up the production slack if the dispute drags on.
Chinese imports of soya have already grown 20 times since 2000.
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Using UN data and consumption trends, exports estimated the area dedicated to soya production in Brazil could increase by as much as 39 per cent – an additional 13 million hectares (32 million acres).
That is a rainforest the size of Greece.
“It’s quite striking. This is the worst-case scenario,” said Richard Fuchs, senior research fellow at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, in Karlsruhe, Germany. “But we know that there are only a few players out there, the important producers are the US, Brazil and Argentina.”
Fuchs and his colleagues warned that additional mass deforestation of the Amazon for agribusiness “will have profound impacts on global attempts to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity”.
The authors stressed that other countries, notably Argentina, could increase production to offset China’s soybean shortfall.
China could also choose to rely less heavily on imported soya. But they say this seems unlikely, as just a two per cent cut in soya for animal feed would result in 10 million tonnes less meat per year for the country’s burgeoning middle class.
The researchers said both history and signals from Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro suggested China’s soya deficit will be compensated by greater production in the Amazon.
Following a 1980 US embargo on soya products to the Soviet Union, the amount of land devoted to soya production in Brazil more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, to more than 24 million hectares.
Bolsonaro has sought to limit the land rights of the Amazon’s indigenous people and plans to merge the environment and agriculture ministries in moves activists say could imperil the rainforest.
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Fuchs argued that the US-China trade war exposed dangerous imbalances in global agriculture.
“Over 80 per cent of crop production in the US is maize and soybean grown in rotation, largely for export,” he said. “If you have a few producers supplying the world market they become highly vulnerable to trade tensions as we see right now.”
