Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Despite two decades of Round Table on Responsible Soy, the volume of physically segregated, deforestation-free soy traded out of Brazil remains negligible; most certified soy instead moves through a credit-based system that separates the certificate from the physical grain. This gap is sharpened by the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which from December 2026 will require all soy placed on the EU market to be legally produced and traceable to deforestation-free land, and by a growing number of companies aligning their deforestation- and conversion-free sourcing commitments with frameworks such as the Accountability Framework initiative (AFi). This thesis examines why physically segregated RTRS-certified soy has failed to scale, asking how stakeholders perceive the feasibility, legitimacy, fairness and power of segregated deforestation- and conversion-free (DCF) supply chains (RQ1), and what has specifically limited their scaling (RQ2).
Drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews with producers in Mato Grosso, traders, cooperatives, NGOs, and downstream buyers over Brazil and Europe, together with a review of academic and grey literature, the thesis finds that segregation is technically feasible where a single actor controls the chain, but is blocked more broadly by fragmented ownership and inconsistent buyer demand, Segregation further raises questions of legitimacy, fairness and power: cut-off dates grow stricter building on the Brazilian law legality, unevenly distributed costs and benefits, and a power standoff in which no single actor can resolve the deadlock alone.
RTRS-certified segregation has failed to scale because three barriers compound one another. First, too much certification moves through the credit system, which decouples the certificate from the physical grain: several interviewees noted that this lets buyers claim they are supporting change on the ground without certification having a big impact on altering production practices, and that credits are simply cheaper to buy than physically segregated soy. Second, certified production is too limited and scattered to fill shared storage capacity. Third, demand for segregated soy is weak and indirect, driven by buyers' sustainability departments rather than consumers, and rarely reaches the upstream actors who would need to act on it. The RTRS-DCF Controlled Mix pilot offers a partial response to the second barrier, but leaves the third untouched.