RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – French president Emmanuel Macron announced on Tuesday, January 12th, that soy will start to be produced in Europe. According to Macron, “to depend on Brazilian soy is to endorse the deforestation of the Amazon.”
The message was disclosed by the French president himself on his social media. “We are consistent with our ecological ambitions. We are fighting to produce soy in Europe,” he added.
“When we import soy produced from the devastated Brazilian forest, we are not being coherent,” he continued. “Do we need Brazilian soy to live? Let’s start producing European soy or the equivalent,” he said.
Deforestation
Macron has been giving public statements of discontent with Brazilian environmental policy since mid-2019, when images of the Amazon fires spread worldwide and increased pressure on the Brazilian government at a time when the European Union is negotiating a trade agreement with MERCOSUR.
At the height of the environmental crisis in the Amazon region, Macron clashed with President Jair Bolsonaro, and the two traded public accusations. The Frenchman described the fires in the country as a “global crisis” and said that the G7 member countries should urgently address the issue. In response, the Brazilian President stated that Macron’s stance evoked “a colonialist mentality inappropriate in the 21st century”.
The Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) commented on Macron’s speech in a note. The organization regretted that “the president of France should try to justify his decision to subsidize French farmers by attacking Brazilian soy.”
“Soy produced in the Amazon biome in Brazil is clear of deforestation since 2008, thanks to the Soy Moratorium, an internationally recognized initiative that monitors, identifies and blocks the acquisition of soy produced in deforested areas,” the association claims. According to ABIOVE, there is “zero risk of sending soybeans from a deforested area (legal or illegal) of this biome to international markets.”