Soy produced in the State of Pará conforms to the social-environmental protocol

Nineteen of the Protocol's 35 signatory companies were audited.  They account for 90% of the state's soy, about 3.2 million tons.  It should be noted that the member companies of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) and the National Association of Grain Exporters (ANEC) had high compliance rates:  ADM, Amaggi, Bunge, Cargill, CHS, COFCO and Glencore, all had evaluations of 94.09% or higher.

Signed in 2014 by the Pará state government, municipalities and companies in the grain production chain, and intermediated by the Federal Prosecutor's Office, the agreement sets out the production sector's responsibility to avoid trading products from areas that were illegally deforested, that were under environmental embargo, that were not registered or were in a irregular position with the Rural Environmental Registration (CAR), that had slave labour or that overlapped conservation units and indigenous lands.

According to Bernardo Pires, ABIOVE's Sustainability Manager, the Protocol sets up purchasing procedures that ensure the legal origins of agricultural production, guaranteeing the maintenance of markets that are demanding in terms of social-economic criteria and sustainability criteria.  This commitment strengthens the Forest Code, emphasising Rural Environmental Registration (CAR) as a tool in environmental planning, guaranteeing legal security and adding value to the grain production chain.

"This is a positive example of how a public-private environmental governance initiative contributes efficiently to sustainability in production processes and, consequently, to Brazil's agribusiness image."

Pires further highlighted the improvements in the programme and its evolution.  "In the last two crop years audited (2018/19 and 2019/20), the non-conformities in the nineteen audited companies averaged 5.8%, significantly lower than the average of 14.6% recorded in the audit of twelve companies in the 2017/18 crop year. These results bring a feeling of mission accomplished and, even acknowledging that improvements can still be made, they show us that it is perfectly possible to reconcile agricultural production expansion with legal sustainability criteria", concluded Pires.