The Soft Commodities Forum (SCF) enables collaboration between six leading agribusinesses to identify solutions to eliminate deforestation and conversion in soy landscapes in the Brazilian Cerrado, operating alongside an advisory group that includes the Accountability Framework Initiative, the Brazilian Rural Society, GIZ Brazil, SustainCERT and the Tropical Forest Alliance. The Cerrado is one of Earth’s most biodiverse savannahs and home to 5% of the planet’s animals and plants. By working in partnership with producers, consumer goods companies, civil society, and governments, the SCF contributes to the preservation of high-priority ecosystems and the transition to more sustainable soy production supply chains, starting in the Cerrado.
The December 2024 annual report outlines progress across the SCF’s alignment of our strategy with the Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5°C and the Farmer First Clusters initiative, while anchoring our efforts in a three-pillar structure: land use monitoring, stakeholder engagement, and landscape transformation, all focused on scaling sustainable soy production.
As of December 2024, the SCF has accomplished the following:
- Expanded scope and enhanced disclosure of deforestation- and conversion-free soy sourcing
- This year’s report presents SCF’s expanded monitoring and reporting scope to include the entire Cerrado biome, covering over 200 million hectares across 800 municipalities. This represents a 1124% increase from its initial focus on 25 municipalities in 2019. Alongside an expanded scope, SCF has implemented a renewed verification protocol, and the adoption of a risk-based assessment framework.
- Farmer First Clusters (FFC) Initiative: scaling landscape transformation
- The FFC initiative’s first annual report highlights the enrollment of 178 farms, covering 700,000 hectares, achieving the conservation of 5,460 hectares of native vegetation, 177 hectares of ecological restoration, and over 1.3 gigatons of CO2-eq emissions avoided. It also introduces a scalable financial model for producer incentivization to reduce the opportunity cost of DCF production in the long-term.
- Launch of new partnerships
- The SCF strives for meaningful engagement with several key stakeholders, including the Consumer Goods Forum Forest Positive Coalition (CGF FCP). At New York Climate Week 2024, the SCF and the CGF FPC, in collaboration with the Tropical Forest Alliance, announced the Sustainable Landscapes Partnership. This will focus on driving investment to transition priority commodity-producing landscapes to forest positive resilient sourcing areas, aiming to develop standardized methods for landscape monitoring and financing DCF production.
- Additionally, at the end of 2024 WBCSD is launching a new Landscape Accelerator – Brazil (LAB) which will advance the broad-scale regenerative transformation of Brazilian landscapes, beginning in the Cerrado. This is a time-bound sprint towards COP30-Belem with key partners from the private sector, finance, and government including the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture. The LAB will draw from the leading work of the SCF, and help to amplify and embed its models (going beyond DCF soy) into policy and finance levers supporting holistic regenerative agricultural systems in Brazil.
Download the SCF progress report for December 2024:
- English version
- Portuguese version (available January 2025)
Download the executive summary:
