Presentation short abstract

China–Brazil soy–meat trade drives major socio-environmental pressures. Using policy analysis and recent interviews, we assess whether China’s emerging green ambitions can foster a just transition in Brazil or reproduce extractive dynamics within Global China’s political ecologies

Presentation long abstract

China’s expanding demand for agro-commodities now constitutes one of the strongest drivers of global food-system pressures, led by soybeans, beef, dairy, forest products, and fruits. These trade flows shape social-environmental impacts in sending systems like Brazil. A 2025 Lancet Commission identified how the global food system is intertwined with all nine planetary boundaries (five already transgressed) and social foundations such as workers’ rights, agency, and equity. Despite China’s centrality in these dynamics, little research has examined how the telecoupled relations between Brazil and China may advance or hinder socio-ecological transitions. We address this gap using policy analysis, recent interview data from Brazilian and European agri-food stakeholders, and recent literature on telecoupling. We critically assess whether China’s emerging sustainability ambitions in biofertilizers, bio-technologies, green finance and deforestation-free sourcing contribute to a just transition in Brazil’s agricultural sector. We focus on the telecoupled soy-meat complex in Brazil-China trade because of (1) the major social-environmental externalities produced along this chain; (2) the technical and political strategies currently being discussed to address them, including bioinput cooperation, changes in trade rules, differential financing for agroecology and family farming, and the expanding influence of both the EU- and China-led regulatory regimes. We argue that China’s evolving environmental governance under Ecological Civilization creates new opportunities for transforming the soy-meat complex, but also risks reproducing extractive and neo-colonial relations. By situating these dynamics within the political ecologies of Global China, we engage with contested possibilities for aligning telecoupled agri-food trade with climate, biodiversity, and social justice goals.