We need somewhere to grow all this soy and Europe isn’t facilitating it all yet. The largest expansion of soy production has been in South America and it’s already contributed to deforestation and change in many important habitats such as the Amazon and Cerrado. Much of this land is incredibly biologically diverse – it’s home to a great array of animals and habitat compositions. Biological diversity is extremely important for a variety of reasons, not just for its own sake, but also for larger global issues such as climate change, resource regulation, soil health and more.

• Research hows that soy production for consumer markets has been linked to habitat loss in Brazil and could be a threat to biodiversity.

A Brazilian moratorium on growing soy in land cleared from Amazon forest has helped reduce this, but other habitats such as the Cerrado haven’t seen the same attention, it’s lost around half of its natural vegetation since the 1950’s a large part of this due to soy expansion.

Other areas at risk include the Atlantic Forest, the Chiquitano Dry Forest, the Gran Chaco, the Pampas in Argentina, the North American prairies and the Uruguayan Campos.

Let’s not forget that when we cut this forest down, we’re destroying not only some of the most unique habitats in the world and all the services that they provide, but also the homes of everything that lives in them.

Carbon sequestration is a natural or artificial process by which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and held in solid or liquid form. Trees sequester carbon, as does the sea. They're a substantial part of why some of the effects of climate change aren't as prominent as they could be yet.

Removing forest - comprised largely of mature trees, releases more carbon back intro the ecosystem and replaces it with young generation soy plants who's ability to capture and hold carbon is a lot less. This is what happens when trees are cut down to plant soy.

Fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are used more and more in modern farming and are of large environmental concern. They can impact water quality, contaminate soil and reduce biodiversity. They can also be detrimental to human health. One study tested 62 samples of breast milk in Mato Grosso, Brazil, finding traces of one or more toxic agrochemicals in every sample. Some estimates suggest that 35% of all pesticides used in Brazil are for soy farming. (The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics)

Studies of soy production in the Brazlian Cerrado found an annual loss from soil erosion of 8 tonnes per hectare of soil, with some areas as high as 19-30 tonnes. Soil erosion can lead to a loss of organic matter and nutrients form an area, reduce water quality and increase the problems of compaction and acidification. More sensitive farming methods can reduce soil erosion, but these practises aren’t used everywhere. The growth in soy demand has encouraged some farmers to plant in more erodible soils.

Water security is a growing issue. Fresh water is more of a finite resource than we think. Between 1997 and 2000, soybean used 4% of global irrigation water. Of course, water used varies among region and farming method - South American soy is mainly rain fed but is irrigated in other areas.

The soy in fields is more compacted than in rainforest, so tends to run off - rather than seep down into the soil. If intensive soy cultivation continues to expand however, we’ll need to use more of the global water supply to facilitate it.

Monoculture is the cultivation of a single crop in one given area. Monocultures are widely evidenced to have negative impacts on ecological services and be more reliant on chemicals to control pests. Diverse ecosystems are more resilient and important to reducing the impacts of events such as climate change. Removing diverse rainforests structures for soy monocultures detracts from a variety of beneficial ecosystem services.

A lot of American soybean production is operated on a large industrial scale, which tends to be bad news to smallholders. For example, many farms in the Brazilian Cerrado and Amazon average 1,000 ha and even up to 50,000 ha (70,000 football pitches).

In Chaco province, Argentina, soy has overtaken smallholder crops such as cotton - the number of farmers owning under 100ha fell by 80% while the number of farms over larger than 1,000ha increased by 230% between 1998 and 2002. Large industrial enterprises can displace local communities in some areas and take away livelihoods if not expanded considerately; it also concentrates the economic benefits to far fewer people. While the growth in soy enterprises may positively impact developing countries’ economies, whether they benefit local individuals is another matter.

There have also been cases of human rights abuses in relation to soy. In 2004 the Brazilian government intervened in 236 cases of slavery in soy farms involving over 6,000 labourers, 127 of which were children. On a positive note, now that many of these cases have been exposed, these problems are being addressed.

Again, these issues are varied by geography. Some estimates believe that conversion to soy has removed four out of five farm jobs in parts of Argentina. On the contrary, soy is an important source of income and employment for several million smallholders in India and China.

GM soy first came about in 1996 to make crops resistant to herbicides. Argentina and the US are now almost entirely in use of GM soy. In 2009 77% of global soy production was GM. Genetic modification is a hotly debated topic – what’s the best approach to GM? We’d argue a precautionary approach. If it doesn’t need to be used, or the only reason to use it is for financial benefit, don’t use it, especially if its impacts aren’t 100%
quantified.