China is Brazil’s main trading partner and accounts for over a quarter of all Brazilian exports. Yet two of the largest products in this trading relationship—beef and soybeans—are also crops that drive deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s deforestation rates declined substantially between 2004 and 2012, but forest clearage needed to raise cattle reversed the trend: The Amazon lost 10,476 square kilometers of rainforest in 2021, the highest total in the decade.