Despite new regulations and innovations in technology and science there remains little transparency around the ubiquitous commodity crop. Nick Hughes reports.
How do you solve a problem like soy?
The commodity crop loved by the food industry for its low cost, high protein content and versatility as an ingredient or feed source is loathed by environmentalists for its role in driving deforestation in some of the most biodiverse places in the world.
WWF says nearly half of global deforestation is caused by the food we eat with soy the main culprit; the NGO highlights how the continued expansion of soy production has led to vast amounts of deforestation in areas such as the Cerrado, a nature-rich, tropical savanna region in eastern Brazil.
Global soy production has increased more than 10-fold over the past 50 years, according to a 2021 article from Our World in Data, the lion’s share of which has been driven by demand for animal feed. More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production with most of the rest used for biofuels or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. “The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception,” wrote Our World In Data deputy editor Hannah Ritchie in that 2021 article.
Despite its ubiquity (or, perhaps, because of it) businesses are still struggling to find a way to source soy sustainably. Published in February, the latest Forest 500 report, which tracks the policies and performance of the 350 most influential companies and 150 financial institutions most exposed to deforestation risk in their supply chains and investments, found that although 52% of companies now have a deforestation commitment relating to soy this hasn’t yet translated into an increase in deforestation and conversion-free commodities.
WWF’s 2023 basket report into the impact of UK shopping baskets on climate and nature painted a bleak picture of grocery retailers’ understanding of the source of soy in their supply chains. Against a target for 100% of soy to be verified deforestation and conversion-free by 2025, just 5% of the total volume sourced by nine retailers met this criteria in 2023, while there remains no direct importer of soy to the UK with a commitment to handle only deforestation and conversion-free soy.
Satellites and samples
So what’s the answer to reducing soy’s impact on the natural world? Partly, it could lie in the application of science and technology. In March, the Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS) at Queen’s University Belfast hosted a webinar on the key issues surrounding global soy sourcing and the work being done to ensure it is traceable back to source.
Examples included the use of satellite imagery to track the change in forest canopy over time across millions of different farm locations in order to identify areas where deforestation has occurred and then plug that information into companies’ supply chain management systems.
Scientists are also working to develop databases of stable isotope ratios obtained from soy samples taken from around the world, which allows them to trace the precise geographical origin of the bean.
Soy manifesto
Yet scientific and technological breakthroughs are only valuable if there is commitment on the part of companies to invest in soy traceability and sustainability. Given the complexity of soy supply chains, that requires an element of pre-competitive collaboration.
In 2021, a group of UK businesses including Tesco, 2Sisters, Greggs and KFC signed up to the UK soy manifesto with the goal of ensuring that all physical shipments of soy to the UK are deforestation and conversion-free as soon as possible and no later than 2025. “It’s fair to say that over the past three to five years, industry has really stepped up when it comes to trying to support sustainable soy production, […..] but we’re not there yet,” Rose McCulloch, from the Efeca consultancy that holds the secretariat for the soy manifesto, told the IGFS webinar.
McCulloch identified a number of barriers to progress on soy including the cost of the transition to more sustainable soy production (and how those costs are shared) and a lack of supply chain information and transparency. “Soy is a just-in-time industry however that does mean it can be challenging to obtain information about where that soy has originated from as a downstream actor,” she said, adding that businesses are nervous of being accused of greenwashing when they make public claims around sustainable soy.
The case for regulation
Slow industry progress towards sourcing verified deforestation and conversion-free commodities like soy has led to calls for regulators to step in. The charity Global Canopy, which produces the Forest 500 report, says that after a decade of voluntary private sector action which has failed to generate meaningful progress on commodity-driven deforestation, regulation is needed to shift the system at the speed and scale required.
And regulators have listened: the EU’s flagship deforestation regulation, the EUDR, will require all forest-risk products named in the regulation’s annex, including things like soybean meal and soybeans, to be deforestation-free regardless of whether the deforestation is legal or illegal in the country of production.
The UK government, meanwhile, plans to make it mandatory for large companies, including those in the food and drink sector, to carry out due diligence checks to ensure there is no illegal deforestation in their supply chains for forest-risk commodities such as soy and palm oil.
These policies are not yet home and hosed however. The EUDR is due to come into effect at the end of this year but the European Commission has recently come under pressure from industry associations, third countries and even some agriculture ministers from EU Member States to delay and weaken the EUDR. In an open letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen published earlier this month, a group of NGOs including WWF, Greenpeace and World Animal Protection urged the EU to stand firm in implementing the new law.
Campaigners have also been agitating over the continued absence of the secondary legislation required to get the UK’s deforestation law onto the statue book and into effect, while the government has rejected a call from the Environmental Audit Committee to extend the regime to include all deforestation, including that carried out legally.
Soy alternatives
Other groups, like the Soil Association, advocate for a move away from soy altogether. A 2022 report by the charity warned of a “hidden scandal” whereby toxic chemicals sprayed on Brazilian soy crops are contributing to the poisoning of people and rare tropical animals in the Amazon, including bees, macaw parrots, endangered tapirs, fish, frogs, birds of prey, and bats. It called for more funding for research into UK-grown alternative protein sources such as sprouting wheat and vetch seeds, grain tailings and processed beans.
Investment is also going into novel feed sources such as insects, algae and single-cell proteins that don’t rely on traditional agricultural methods for their production; however these are not yet commercially available at the kind of scale and cost required to displace demand for soy.
Some livestock producers have already decided to eschew soy in favour of locally-grown feed sources. Chickens at Redwoods Farm, near Tiverton in Devon, are fed a soy-free wheat-based feed mix with protein derived from beans, rapeseed meal, peas and maize mostly grown within a 10-mile radius of the farm. Yet with a production cycle of up to four times the length of that of intensively reared broilers, the model is unlikely to be replicable at scale – at least not without a significant reduction in demand for chicken.
Market trends are pointing in the other direction. A joint outlook report for the period 2021-2030 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted how global meat consumption has been shifting towards poultry in recent years and estimated that poultry meat is expected to represent 41% of all the protein from meat sources in 2030, up two percentage points from 2021. Since around half of soybeans processed for feed are currently used for poultry, the need to solve the soy sourcing conundrum could hardly be more urgent.
