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By Ana Mano
CAMPINAS, Brazil, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Global grain traders are
against banning soy purchases from newly deforested areas of
Brazil's savannah region, that would duplicate a similar
moratorium in place for the Amazon rainforest, an industry
association said on Thursday.
"There is no intention of doing this," Lucas Brito,
executive assistant at grain exporters group Anec, told Reuters
on the sidelines of an industry conference in Campinas.
Anec represents major grain traders including Archer Daniels
Midland Co, Cargill Inc, Cofco, Louis Dreyfus Corp,
Glencore and others.
Brito's comment comes two days after Brazilian farmers said
they would launch a campaign to eliminate the so-called "soy
moratorium" in the Amazon and that they saw no room for a
similar agreement in the Cerrado, as Brazil's savannah is
known.
Agreed to in 2006, the Amazon soy moratorium bans trading in
soy from areas deforested after 2008. The industry previously
praised it for virtually eliminating soy-related deforestation
in the region.
Neighboring the rainforest, the Cerrado savannah takes up
roughly a quarter of Brazil and is the country's second largest
biome after the Amazon.
The region has been critical to the expansion of Brazil's
soy farming, but that growth has also lead to the destruction of
about half of the Cerrado's vegetation over the last 50
years.
Environmentalists say Brazil's success in preserving the
Amazon helped push further soy expansion in the Cerrado, leading
some to call for a similar moratorium in the savannah.
Anec claims that replicating the model in the Cerrado would
not work.
Brito said one reason is Brazil's new forestry code, which
came into force in 2012. Under the code, farmers have the right
to expand planting on their properties, observing certain
limits, which is incompatible with the concept of the
moratorium, he said.
Brito said the challenge now is to reconcile those land-use
rules and the sustainable production requirements imposed by
Brazil's main customers.
He suggested one long-proposed idea that would pay farmers
to preserve areas they could otherwise plant on. Prior efforts
to institute such payments for "environmental services" have
stalled as it is unclear how they would be paid for.
A representative of Brazil's Agriculture Ministry agreed
with Anec's call for such a system to be implemented.
"If the market and consumers see a premium in this
additional preservation, they are free to pay for this type of
initiative," said Flavio Bettarello, a trade and international
affairs officer at the ministry.
(Reporting by Ana Mano
Editing by Jake Spring and Marguerita Choy)
