Flávio Bolsonaro Vows to End Amazon Soy Deforestation Moratorium
Key Facts
— —Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — the right-wing frontrunner for Brazil’s October 2026 presidential election — pledged on April 22 at the Norte Show agribusiness fair in Sinop, Mato Grosso to end the Amazon soy moratorium, the 20-year-old voluntary accord that bars traders from buying soybeans from land deforested after 2008.
— —The timing is strategic: Brazil’s Supreme Court set April 30 as the deadline for stakeholders to manifest on the case, while antitrust regulator CADE decided last year to suspend the agreement with enforcement starting in 2026, leaving the pact in a contested legal position.
— —Flávio also committed to restoring Plano Safra credit lines at lower interest rates, opposing new indigenous land demarcations in Mato Grosso (citing 2.2 million hectares under review), and defending the marco temporal thesis — a platform explicitly designed to lock in Brazil’s agribusiness vote against President Lula.
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The soy moratorium Brazil pledge lands in the middle of a live legal battle over the accord — and two weeks before the Supreme Court deadline that will define its near-term future.
The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that Senator Flávio Bolsonaro publicly committed on Wednesday, April 22 to ending the soy moratorium Brazil has enforced for nearly 20 years, the voluntary multi-sector pact signed in 2006 that bars major grain traders from buying soybeans grown on land cleared in the Amazon after July 2008. The statement was made at the Norte Show agribusiness fair in Sinop, Mato Grosso — the heart of Brazil’s soybean frontier and the most visible agribusiness event on the political calendar. “It is important to commit to ending the moratorium,” Flávio told reporters at the event, arguing that the accord functions as a boycott of farmers who follow the Forest Code.
The PL senator is the right-wing frontrunner in Brazil’s October 2026 presidential race: a Datafolha poll conducted April 7-9 placed him at 46% against President Lula’s 45% in a simulated runoff — the first numerical reversal of the series. A Nexus poll for BTG Pactual conducted March 27-29 showed the two tied at 46% each, with prediction markets Polymarket pricing Lula at 42% to Flávio’s 37.1% on election outcome. The moratorium pledge is a direct appeal to the agribusiness vote that dominated the 2022 Bolsonaro electoral base.
The legal battlefield around the soy moratorium Brazil debate
The soy moratorium — first signed in 2006 by ABIOVE (processors), ANEC (exporters), and NGOs including Greenpeace — has come under sustained legal assault for two years. In September 2025, Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) ruled that the agreement among competing traders might violate antitrust law, decreeing its suspension with enforcement starting January 1, 2026. The ruling was immediately challenged, and the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) has set April 30, 2026 as the deadline for stakeholders to file their final manifestos in the ongoing case.
Running in parallel, Mato Grosso’s state legislature passed a 2024 law removing fiscal benefits from companies that participate in agreements like the moratorium, arguing that the accord goes beyond the Forest Code. STF Justice Flávio Dino partially reinstated the Mato Grosso law in April 2025, with effect from January 1, 2026. The legal architecture leaves the moratorium technically suspended, practically disputed, and politically central to the 2026 campaign.
Flávio proposed bringing CADE to the table alongside the STF to accelerate the case, framing the moratorium as ideological interference with legally compliant producers. The agreement’s defenders — ABIOVE, environmental groups, and EU-aligned buyers — argue that the moratorium has been one of the most effective deforestation-control instruments of the last two decades, coinciding with a 400% expansion of Amazonian soy production without corresponding deforestation.
What the commitment means for traders and investors
The commercial exposure is concentrated in five traders that signed the original pact: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and Cofco — the firms that handle the vast majority of Brazilian soy exports, 78% of which go to China. If the moratorium is definitively suspended, these traders face an immediate question: do they continue to enforce the criteria voluntarily on imports to the EU, where deforestation-related regulation (EUDR) comes into force later this cycle, or do they align with the Brazilian legal environment and accept post-2008 deforested soy.
For international investors tracking Brazil’s agribusiness sector, the moratorium question is a leading indicator for the broader deforestation-compliance framework under a potential right-wing presidency. Aprosoja Mato Grosso, the farmers’ group closely aligned with the Bolsonaro coalition, has welcomed the CADE ruling and continues to push for full termination of the voluntary pact. The broader agricultural outlook is covered in The Rio Times’s Brazil Agribusiness 2026 Guide.
Flávio’s full Norte Show agenda
The moratorium commitment was part of a broader platform pitch to Mato Grosso agribusiness. Flávio also pledged to restore Plano Safra agricultural credit lines with simplified access and lower interest rates, committing to fiscal responsibility as the mechanism that would allow rate compression. He said no new indigenous reserves would be demarcated in Mato Grosso under his administration, pointing to 2.2 million hectares of pending FUNAI requests across 22 municipalities in the state.
The senator again defended the marco temporal thesis — which limits indigenous land recognition to territories occupied on the date of the 1988 Constitution — and classified the current government’s indigenous policy as “ideological.” He also criticized the STF’s First Chamber and asked Court President Edson Fachin not to interfere with the 2026 election. The event is the platform’s most visible policy rollout since the February eight-point program he outlined, which centered on privatizations, spending cuts, and a rollback of Lula’s tax reform.
The soy moratorium Brazil pledge is designed to consolidate the agribusiness bloc around Flávio’s candidacy ahead of the STF April 30 deadline. What happens between now and that filing window — and particularly how Abiove, ANEC and the major trading houses position themselves — will define the commercial and political trajectory of the pact through the 2026 election cycle. For full pre-election tracking, see The Rio Times’s 2026 election poll tracker.
Related coverage: Brazil Agribusiness 2026 Guide • Datafolha: Flávio Leads Lula in Runoff • Brazil 2026 Election Poll Tracker
More: Brazil news in English, every day from The Rio Times.
This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief