“The only way for us to have any security is to become legal,” says Claudio Goncalves, a strapping farmer who recently moved to Belterra, a small town about a two-hour drive south of Santarém. He purchased 1,700 acres to farm soy, rice and corn.

A handful of initial participants in the initiative dropped out because they failed to meet the guidelines or because they are working land bought or obtained illegally, says Cleary. (The Conservancy’s soy team so far has flagged around a dozen people whose documents — or lack of them — aroused suspicion.) The rest of the farmers know they have little choice but to get involved, even if reluctantly.

“They hate environmentalists and were very suspicious, especially in the beginning,” says Cleary. “In fact, many of them who own more than one property only declared one during the first phase to see what was going to happen. Then a year later, when they could see we weren’t going to descend on them with SWAT teams, they declared their others.”

Despite the potential benefits, the farmers around Santarém all know that compliance will also cost them. “The problem is how to compensate,” says Maraschin. “How is it going to work? Do we have to buy land? This is very complex. There are a lot of doubts in my mind.”

Few farmers and ranchers have the cash available to buy additional plots of forested land that could bring their ratio of native vegetation up to the mandated 80 percent. And many won’t be able to scrape by if they substantially reduce their soy harvest to meet reforestation goals. A report by the Brazil-based Amazon Institute for Environmental Research finds that profit margins for ranches in the Amazon drop to zero when owners fully comply with the Forest Code.

One solution for bringing the farmers into compliance is to create a reserve bank of forested land for farmers to buy into, rather than having each farmer buy or restore small patches of a few hundred acres on their own. Such a huge investment could be funded by Cargill, which would set aside funding to buy the reserve. The bill would ultimately be passed on to the farmers, with Cargill deducting a percentage of its payments to the farmers to recover the costs.

“We can find one piece of forest measuring 250,000 acres or we can find three or four smaller pieces,” says Ana Cristina Barros, the Conservancy’s representative in the capital city, Brasilia. “They could be used as a refuge or to create biodiversity corridors or as fire breaks. The compensatory forest could even be given over as reserves to traditional communities.”

Many of the farmers working out on the small farms bordering the Santarém-Cuiabá highway recognize that after years of forest destruction, something has to give. Some claim to love the forest and wish to see more of it, some say they are simply resigned to having to comply with the Forest Code, and a few say the lack of tree cover is a factor in causing the longer and hotter summers and the late rains that often hamper their plantings.

Still, it remains to be seen as to whether the law can be enforced without driving Brazil’s soy farmers out of business.

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Nature picture credits: All Photos © Alex Webb/Magnum Photos