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Popular Fact

This fact appears to have become popular through the following New York Times quote from 2009.

As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans.
New York Times - The Carnivore’s Dilemma - 2009

Unhelpfully this article provides no citation, so we are forced to consult Google which reveals a study regarding Mato Grosso we can use as reference which was published a year after the New York Times article (but does not support the 70% statistic). See the Elizabeth Barona, Navin Ramankutty, et al. metanalysis below.

Reality

Recent deforestation in the Legal Amazon was predominantly due to cattle ranching not soybean expansion.
Globally 77% of the annual soybean harvest is fed to livestock, meaning that the vast majority of soybean production is driven by meat production.
- TalkVeganToMe

The above quote is a combination of the findings of the below Nature article by David M. Lapola, Luiz A. Martinelli, et al. and the USDA statistics you can find in our article Soy Fed to Livestock.

Elizabeth Barona, Navin Ramankutty, et al. - The role of pasture and soybean in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon

This metanalysis is included as a contemporary of the New York Times quote.

A more recent study by an environmental organization and a soybean trade group analyzed 250 m resolution MODIS scenes containing 630 sample areas of deforested land in Mato Grosso, and found that only 12 sample areas (0.88% in terms of area) were in soy cultivation, while nearly 200 were converted to pasture land (32% in terms of area) (Greenpeace-Brazil 2009). - Elizabeth Barona, Navin Ramankutty, et al. - The role of pasture and soybean in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon - April 2010

The most relevant stat here is the 0.88% used for soy cultivation which is cited as Greenpeace Brazil - Amazon Cattle Footprint. Mato Grosso: State of Destruction - 2009 - p15. However, the article itself seems to provide no breakdown, nor even mention of the 630 sample areas, or 12 sample areas being in soy cultivation. The stat actually seems to come from a press release from Abiove (see below).

However, the metanalysis goes on to conclude

The proximate cause of deforestation in the Legal Amazon was predominantly the expansion of pasture, and not of soybeans. However, in Mato Grosso, an increase in soybeans occurred in regions previously used for pasture, which may have displaced pastures further north into the forested areas, causing indirect deforestation there. Therefore, soybean cultivation may still be one of the major underlying causes of deforestation in the Legal Amazon.

This does not provide any stats however, so we are ultimately no closer to validating the 70% figure other to conclude that the research available at the time of the New Yorker suggested that:

[R]ecent deforestation in the Legal Amazon was predominantly due to cattle ranching (Morton et al 2006, Brown et al 2005, Greenpeace-Brazil 2009), and not soybean expansion.
- Elizabeth Barona, Navin Ramankutty, et al. - The role of pasture and soybean in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon - April 2010

Nature - David M. Lapola, Luiz A. Martinelli, et al. - Pervasive transition of the Brazilian land-use system

To give us some context for the trend of Brazilian Deforestation we can refer to a 2014 study published in Nature.

Despite this pressure, there has been a prominent decline in overall deforestation since 2005: from an annual average of ~18,000 km2 in the 1990–2004 period to ~10,500 km2 in 2005–2012, with the lowest rate ever of 4,571 km2 in 2012
- David M. Lapola, Luiz A. Martinelli, et al. - Pervasive transition of the Brazilian land-use system - p29

This gives us a reduction of 75% in the speed at which the Amazon rainforest is being deforested between the 1990s and 2012 which is useful context for understanding the context for these figures. Even more interestingly:

Pastures for beef production remain the dominant land use, occupying 60% to 80% of deforested land
- David M. Lapola, Luiz A. Martinelli, et al. - Pervasive transition of the Brazilian land-use system - p29

The article cites this statistic as coming from the TerraClass Land-use Database as of Sept 2013.

Abiove - Soy Moratorium contributes to containment of deforestation in the Amazon Biome - 2009

[T]he Soy Moratorium monitored this year’s crop, including a field survey, mainly by flyovers, in 630 areas that were deforested after July 2006, with the objective of checking onsite land use and occupation in the selected areas. Soy planting was identified in only 12 polygons[…]
The 12 polygons cover a deforested area of 2,157 hectares, of which 1,385 hectares were planted with soy. For comparison purposes, this year’s monitoring covered 157,898 deforested hectares. […]
Satellite images, panoramic and close-up photographs of all 630 monitored polygons are available on ABIOVE’s site, www.abiove.com.br. Total transparency.
- Abiove - Soy Moratorium contributes to containment of deforestation in the Amazon Biome - 2009 - p1

This is original research with detailed methodology and the source data is available on abiove.com.br and therefore passes as a quality source. However the metanalysis by Elizabeth Barona, Navin Ramankutty, et al. above suggests it may not be the whole story.

Sources

Article Contributors

Sam Martin
Author