
In 2006, Greenpeace launched a campaign exposing deforestation caused by soy production in the Brazilian Amazon. In the previous year, soy farming expanded into more than 1,600 square kilometers of recently cleared forests. The destruction, they said, had to stop. In response, major soy companies in the region reached a landmark agreement as signatories to the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), pledging not to purchase crops grown on recently cleared land. Deforestation fell in the following years, but no one had measured the moratorium’s aggregate impact.