This is a soybean farm in Brazil.
And this is a meat market in China.
These two places have everything to do with each other.
The meat sold at Sanyuanli Market in Beijing comes from Chinese farms.
The animals on those farms eat soybeans, and most of those come from one place: Brazil.
–Everything you see here will soon be on the dining tables of Chinese consumers.
But, not in the form of soybeans.
As incomes have risen in China, so has meat consumption.
The economies of Brazil, Argentina and others have shifted to meet that demand, putting
more emphasis than ever on soybeans.
It shows how Chinese consumers can reshape entire economies, even large ones.
But in the long run, this could do more harm than good.
We’re traveling around the world to find out how China is changing… basically everything.
This week, agriculture.
I’m Nikhil Sonnad reporting for Quartz.
You’re watching Because China.
This is Márcio Binotti, he runs a company that sells soybean seeds to growers.
At his facility, the beans are husked… dried… sorted… and bagged up.
–So, I’m climbing this wall of soybeans on a very unsafe ladder.
Each one of these bags contains about six million soybean seeds,
which we're told can produce about 72 tons of soybeans.
From here, the beans find their way back into the ground, and from there, they go abroad.
Nearly all the soybeans Brazil grows are exported, and they overwhelmingly go to China.
China is the world’s largest importer of soybeans, buying $38 billion-worth in 2018,
almost 20 times more than the next-highest importer.
Brazil is by far the biggest source of those beans, accounting for over 75%.
That’s great news in particular for Brazil’s biggest farms, since the top 1.5% of rural landowners
control over half of the country’s agricultural land.
Why so much soy?
For one thing, it’s illegal in China to grow genetically modified soybeans, so Brazil’s
GMO beans are cheaper.
Plus, China used to get a lot from the US, but the trade war between those two countries
has put huge tariffs on soybeans, leading American exports to decline.
So Brazil is more important than ever.
That’s why, at this trade fair held just outside Brasilia, every aspect of the soybean
industry is on display.
Brazil has plenty of land suitable for growing soybeans.
But to keep up with Chinese demand, it needs even more.
And increasingly, it’s finding it underneath Brazil’s forests.
–We are seeing that the deforestation increased a lot in the past five years.
Isabelle Figueiredo is an ecologist at an NGO based in Brasilia that works on conservation
and sustainability.
Brazil’s most famous forest is the Amazon, here.
This map was created by the MapBiomas initiative, which uses satellite imagery to
track deforestation.
The red dots here represent parts of the Amazon that, since 1985, have been turned from forest,
into agriculture.
The problem goes well beyond the rainforest.
Isabelle’s work focuses on the Cerrado, a vast savannah in central Brazil, the most
biodiverse in the world and one-fourth of the country's total land area.
Deforestation is happening there even faster than in the Amazon.
Over half of the forests in this part of Brazil are gone.
This is what it looks like now.
This is what the area we filmed looked like from overhead in 1984, and here it is in 2016.
And here’s what Cerrado deforestation looks like on a larger scale—it’s covered in red dots.
This affects more than just forests and the animals that live in them—it affects people, too.
When forests are destroyed, they absorb less carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change
and affecting weather in faraway countries.
And within Brazil, the Cerrado is home to many indigenous groups.
Valdemilso Ariabo is the leader of Balatipone People, an indigenous group that lives in
the state of Mato Grosso, where large amounts of forest is being cleared
to make room for farms.
He has come to Brasilia to meet with other indigenous leaders and discuss how they can
protect their lands.
And there’s a new sense of urgency.
He’s referring to the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president.
Bolsonaro has already loosened restrictions on protected lands, and has referred to indigenous
people living on them as “zoo animals.”
This strong stance against indigenous people has emboldened attackers who forcibly take
their lands and sell them to farmers.
In the past, some of these attacks have ended in deaths.
–The farms, they are coming into the valleys and destroying houses.
They are killing people to make people to leave the areas that they are occupying traditionally.
Numbers of such deaths—which often happen deep in the rainforest—are hard to come by.
But in 2017, even before Bolsonaro was elected, at least 70 were killed in “land conflicts.”
His administration says it doesn’t support violence.
But they do argue that there is an economic reason for turning forest into farmland.
–In general, people see that, for us to have income, we need to deforest to clear
and then plant some commodity.
There is some truth to that.
Brazil’s agribusiness sector, in which soybeans are the most important product,
created 19 million jobs in 2015.
People in Brazil’s soybean-growing areas tend to be better educated and healthier.
But those economic gains are not equally distributed.
One study found that areas with soy production have higher levels of income inequality.
What’s more, Brazil’s emphasis on exporting soybeans and other commodities
is probably not even good for the economy in the long run.
–Stronger economies tend to be those that are diversified.
Margaret Myers is director of the Asia and Latin America Program at The Dialogue, a think-tank
based in Washington, DC.
–And, increasingly, there's this reliance on soy in particular but also other primary commodities.
It is seen as a problematic feature of the Brazilian economy.
Brazil’s economy has long relied on commodity exports—beginning with sugar and coffee,
later iron ore and oil, and now soybeans.
The hope has been that money from commodities could be used to move toward a more sophisticated
economy, with value-added exports and services, but many fear that Bolsonaro’s close connections
with the agribusiness sector means he will instead stick with the old model.
That’s risky for a few reasons.
For one, it exposes Brazil to the risks of changes in prices and demand.
Environmental damage poses another long-term risk to the economy.
When farmers clear the diverse Cerrado, and plant a single crop, year after year, the
soil eventually fails to grow that crop effectively.
The rates of “monocropping,” as it’s called, are higher in Brazil than in other places.
And Isabel says that yields from soy farms have already been falling.
–How sustainable is it to take this approach to the economy?
No sustainability at all.
–The Chinese consumer is driving so much in the emergence of new industries
across the globe.
This is not just the case in soy production and in agriculture but really across the board.
The sheer scale of Chinese consumer demand has reshaped Brazil’s economy, politics,
and even its environment.
It’s not just Brazil: developing countries around the world are staking their futures
on figuring out what China’s increasingly wealthy population wants to buy.
The pull of China is stronger than ever—but if Brazil, and countries like it, want to
succeed in the long term, they’ll have to push, too, to create the future
they want, not the one China needs.