The Rise and Fall of Brazil's Soy Moratorium

For the last two decades, a widely adopted commitment by soybean traders to avoid sourcing from farms in the Brazilian Amazon with recent deforestation has contributed to reducing deforestation across the biome. Recently, legal and political challenges to this commitment have led to its likely demise. We review the evolution of the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM) policy context and present estimates of the area of forest at risk with the end of the policy. Ending the ASM will lead to increased deforestation in the Amazon and could discourage the adoption of policies against deforestation by other private sector actors more broadly.