Trump’s Trade War Could Turbocharge Deforestation in the Amazon

This past December, I was driving down the Trans-Amazonian Highway, near the city of Santarém, in northern Brazil, when the road disappeared into what I thought was fog. When I got out of the car, though, I realized that the haze was smoke, wafting thick and acrid from the burning forest. The week before, Santarém had registered at 581 on the air-quality index—among the worst ratings in the world.

Fire is not a natural phenomenon in the Amazon, but now the flames arrive with alarming frequency and scale. Each dry season, farmers carve up and burn hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres in one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sinks to make way for cattle pastures and soy plantations, the leading engines of deforestation across Brazil. According to a January report, in recent years, deforestation due to soy production has increased.

Now global-trade tensions threaten to further accelerate the ecological destruction. President Donald Trump’s 145 percent tariff on imports from China and China’s 125 percent reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods could reroute a significant share of China’s demand for American commodities. Soybeans are among the United States’ top exports to China, supplying about 30 percent of the country’s demand. If tariffs on U.S. soybeans remain, China will almost certainly purchase more from Brazil, the only country that produces more soybeans than the U.S.—just as it did during a trade war with Trump in 2018. Experts fear that such a boost in demand for Brazilian soy, coupled with moves to cut environmental policies in soy-producing Brazilian states, could drive further deforestation.

Some of that deforestation will likely happen in the Cerrado, the savanna biome next to the Amazon that serves as Brazil’s second-largest source of carbon storage. The Cerrado is governed by much laxer environmental laws than the Amazon, and has become a major hub for soybean production. There, deforestation is rampant.

In the Amazon, far more land is legally protected, and rules dictating how much farmers can clear their own land are much stricter. “Our published research shows that there is very little land that’s suitable for soy and that can be legally cleared in the Brazilian Amazon,” Lisa Rausch, who studies Brazilian deforestation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Just because clearing land for soy is illegal, though, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. Brazil has a solid system of regulations and institutions to prevent illegal deforestation, but enforcement is weak, especially in the Amazon, which has a long history of illegal slash-and-burning. One study found that almost 91 percent of all deforestation in the Amazon from August 2023 to July 2024 happened without authorization.

Rising soybean prices will boost demand for the cleared land that farmers generally need to grow the beans. Soy production in the Amazon tends to follow an established pattern: First, loggers cut down the most precious trees, opening up roads through the forest. Then cattle farmers cut and burn the remaining forest and lay claim (legally or not) to the land. Eventually, they sell the cattle-cleared land to soy farmers. The cattle farmers seek out new pastures, pushing the agricultural frontier ever deeper into the rainforest. “The Amazon offers far more land than anywhere else. There are over 50 million hectares of open pastures, many of them degraded,” Mairon G. Bastos Lima, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told me.

Brazil’s political landscape is also shifting in ways that could allow for more legal deforestation in the Amazon. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has advocated for more action on illegal deforestation. But since last year, right-wing governors in the Amazon’s soy-producing states, among them Mato Grosso, have been attempting to gut environmental regulations. This includes changing the designation of some land in the Amazon to savanna, significantly increasing the amount that can be legally deforested. These same governors have passed laws that effectively void the Soy Moratorium, a voluntary agreement that has contributed to a historically steep decline in deforestation by barring signatory companies from purchasing soy grown on land in the Amazon that was deforested after 2008. A similar campaign against the Soy Moratorium is also starting to play out at the federal level. The Brazilian supreme court suspended Mato Grosso’s law and has yet to rule on whether undermining the Soy Moratorium is constitutional. Undermining the agreement could boost Brazil’s soy-driven economy but also create new incentives to clear the rainforest. “The fact that the Amazon soy moratorium is actively being weakened right now, I think it puts Brazil at a really precarious place,” Rausch said.

The Amazon covers nearly 7 million square kilometers and contains approximately a fifth of all the carbon captured by vegetation across the planet. Soybean plantations capture only a fraction of the carbon that tropical rainforests do, and drive emissions through transportation and processing. Deforestation has also been correlated with dry spells and a delayed rainy season—bad for soybeans and other crops that depend on the rain as well as for the rainforest and the people that live in it. Data from Trase, a nonprofit that tracks global supply chains for commodities, show that soy-linked deforestation released 133.4 million U.S. tons of CO₂ in 2022 alone—equivalent to the electricity use of more than 15 million U.S. homes. Losing even more of the Amazon’s carbon bank to soy farming could greatly accelerate global warming.

The climate isn’t the only thing at stake. A few days after my smoke encounter, I visited the Munduruku do Planalto, an Indigenous group who live in several communities about 30 miles east of Santarém. The plateau they live on is favored for soybean production, and their villages have become oases of forest, streams, and açai groves surrounded by soybean plantations. The Munduruku now live with water contaminated by agricultural runoff and harassment from surrounding soybean farmers. “We have lost everything, in so many ways—socially, culturally, spiritually, and economically,” Manoel Munduruku, a prominent leader of the Munduruku do Planalto, told me. Indigenous communities, including the Munduruku, have historically been one of the most effective buffers against deforestation in the Amazon. But they too are under threat: In February, a Brazilian-supreme-court justice introduced a proposal that would significantly weaken Indigenous land rights.

The exact contours of soybean demand in the new economic world that Trump has created remain to be seen. The U.S. president has already postponed the aggressive tariffs he originally proposed, except in the case of China (although he left a blanket 10 percent in place for most foreign goods), and he may change his mind again with little warning. Growing frustration from American soybean farmers and industry associations, who operate primarily in red states, could prove to be politically damaging, especially given that soybean farmers were hard-hit by tariffs in Trump’s first term, and many are still recovering. But if the tariffs stick, their most lasting effects for Brazil—taxed at only 10 percent even under the original plan—will likely be not geopolitical, but environmental. As Brazil plans to host COP30 later this year, a surge in soy exports could undermine the very climate goals that world leaders will gather to discuss. It would be a dilemma for Brazil—and for the world.