US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin will be in Beijing for talks with other top officials on Thursday. The meeting is once again struggling to resolve the trade dispute between the US and China. In early April, a Chinese negotiating team is expected to see Vice Premier Liu He in Washington.
Both sides had in recent months imposed punitive tariffs on goods worth billions. Soybeans are also among the American commodities that prevent China from importing high tariffs. And that, researchers warn in a commentary in the journal "Nature", could lead to massive problems for the Brazilian rainforest - and thus for the global climate. After all, the Amazon is a global CO2 storage.
The scientists around Richard Fuchs of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Garmisch-Partenkirchen warn of a "deforestation wave" in the rainforest. They calculate that in the worst case scenario in Brazil, additional arable land the size of Greece would be needed to cover the Chinese soybean demand.
AFP
Soya is unloaded from Brazil in the port of the Chinese city of Nantong (in August 2018)
The researchers' argument goes like this: meat consumption has been rising in China for decades. Soya is used to feed the animals. However, that comes only to a small extent from domestic production, since the beginning of the millennium, the Chinese soybean production has even fallen by about a quarter. Instead, the country imports on a large scale: from Brazil, from where imports have increased by 2000 percent over the same period, but also from the US, where there was an increase of 700 percent.
In the wake of the trade conflict and the associated punitive tariffs, imports from the US have recently collapsed massively - by 50 percent in 2018. And, according to the researchers, the dispute between Beijing and Washington even had an impact on the second half of the year. Fuchs and his colleagues now assume that China will continue to keep soybean sales in the US low in the future, switching to other suppliers instead, especially Brazil.
AP Photo / Andre Penner
Soy on a field in Mato Grosso (in March 2012)
The imports from there had already risen last year, by the end of 2018 already had 75 percent of Chinese soybean come from Brazil. The country has completely compensated for the American drop in supply. And Brazil continues to have "the infrastructure and space to increase production quickly," the researchers write.
For their comment, the researchers evaluated data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). As a result, China bought more than 37 million tons of soy from the US in 2016. If the country wanted to obtain this amount completely from Brazil, the acreage would have to grow there by up to 13 million hectares or 130,000 square kilometers. That corresponds to the size of Greece.
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The researchers point out that the deforestation of the Amazon in the most dramatic years of 1996 and 2004 has been at three million hectares or 30,000 square kilometers. Now the trees could fall on another 130,000 square kilometers.
Soy cultivation is often not directly responsible for deforestation. Instead, the plant is grown on past pastureland. And as a substitute for these areas trees are then cleared. Therefore, it is also relatively quickly possible to expand the agricultural land at the expense of the forest, said Fuchs.
REUTERS / Paulo Whitaker
Soy cultivation on cleared rainforest in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso (February 2008)
"Even if we do not reach the worst-case scenario, there are still huge areas at stake," says the researcher. If all 94 countries that currently supply soybeans to China increase their production in line with their previous shares, the land requirement in Brazil would nevertheless increase by 5.7 million hectares or 57,000 square kilometers. That would be an area twice as big as Belgium.
Brazil's new president Jair Bolsonaro is considered a friend of his country's agricultural and timber companies. He has declared war on the protectors of the rainforest. Even before his election, deforestation increased again. In January, the first month of Bolsonaro's term, deforestation in the Amazon, according to the research institute Imazon even 54 percent compared to the same month last year.
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Political observers point out that the Chinese might be able to accommodate Americans far and wide on the question of agricultural imports, in order to avoid compromises in other areas. The promise of additional soybean imports is one of the less painful concessions in the trade dispute for Beijing.
On the other hand, Trade Representative Lighthizer has publicly stated that he has been particularly encouraged by Sino-US businessmen to hold trade talks - and not to be fobbed off selling a few soybeans.
"Both sides have signaled that they want a deal in the coming weeks," says researcher Fischer. "But it's not said that such a deal will last." From his point of view, China will look long-term for supply alternatives for soy, and Brazil stands by.
STR / AFP
Chinese farmers in Shandong province dry soy (in October 2018)
How could the problem of imminent deforestation at least be mitigated? The researchers have a number of suggestions:
- Soya should be excluded from trade disputes because of its importance to the issue of Amazon deforestation, so tariffs should be abolished.
- China should focus more on alternative soybean trading partners, including the European Union.
- The international community should encourage Brazil to be more effective in protecting the environment - and to pay money through support programs if the forest is left untouched.
- China could grow more soy again.
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But would not it also be possible for the Chinese to simply reduce their soy consumption? The researchers do not believe that. They point out that the use of only two percent less soy for animal feed per year would lead to production losses of ten million tons of meat per year.
The last solution proposed by the scientists is:
- Consumers in China and the rest should be persuaded to eat less meat. But while meat consumption actually declines slightly in Germany, for the time being, it does not look as if this wish of the researchers will come true.
Incidentally, when asked if he still eats meat himself, scientist Richard Fuchs does not have to think long. He has "greatly reduced his consumption," he says. The rest of the family eat completely vegetarian.