“Meet Brazil's former 'King of Soy', now hailed by some conservationists”, 27^th December 2019

…In 2005, Greenpeace gave [Blairo Maggi] the Golden Chainsaw award, for his "unparalleled contribution to Amazonian deforestation". Maggi remains a leader of the "ruralist bench", the agribusiness lobby that dominates Congress and that has supported President Jair Bolsonaro's promise to expand Brazil's agricultural frontier…

Blairo Maggi: We need to put this into context. I come from a generation that came to this region with an order to exploit it. The government at the time encouraged deforestation, land grabbing, the expansion of agriculture and livestock production…

When I started my mandate as governor in 2003, we were deforesting 400,000 hectares…per year in this state. Nowadays, it doesn't reach 80,000 hectares (about 200,000 acres)...At that time, my company, as an exporter, was already under pressures from overseas markets to adopt a different attitude, a different awareness of the value of the forest and biodiversity. And since the markets always rule, we started changing the way our company did things...

Since 2017, Amazonian deforestation has been on the rise, especially since Bolsonaro took office this year and relaxed controls, lambasted the notion of climate change and even threatened to follow US President Donald Trump's example by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord…