E-Mail
In 2006, Greenpeace launched a campaign exposing deforestation caused by soy production in the Brazilian Amazon. In the previous year, soy farming expanded into more than 1,600 square kilometers of recently cleared forests. The destruction, they said, had to stop.
In response, major soy companies in the region reached a landmark agreement as signatories to the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), pledging not to purchase crops grown on recently cleared land. Deforestation fell in the following years, but no one had measured the moratorium s aggregate impact.
Now, assistant professor Robert Heilmayr and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Madison have quantified the ASM s effects and documented how it achieved its success. The researchers found that the agreement prevented thousands of square kilometers of deforestation over its first decade. What s more, the policy did not appear to hamper agricultural growth or push deforestation to other sectors or regions. The study,
Success in the Amazon: Reduced deforestation phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.