The Soft Commodities Forum (SCF) is a sectoral platform that enables value chain collaboration, traceability, and transparency across the soy value chain. Bringing together leading agribusinesses, the SCF works in active partnership with farmers, consumer goods companies, financial institutions, and civil society, enabling coordinated action that individual companies could not achieve alone. By developing shared metrics and scaling landscape-level incentives, the SCF accelerates the transition toward resilient, deforestation- and conversion-free (DCF) agricultural production.
By 2025, it consolidated monitoring of 100% of the Cerrado biome, covering over 200 million hectares and establishing an unprecedented sectoral database for transparency and accountability. It employs a common reporting methodology for Deforestation and Conversion Free (DCF) volumes, verified through independent third-party audits, ensuring the integrity of data shared with the market.
The Challenge & Opportunity
Agriculture is fundamental to ensuring local livelihoods and meeting the growing global demand for food. Ensuring its long-term resilience requires decoupling landscape conversion from sector growth. The challenge is not just technical, it is economic. More and more, productivity relies on good management of the soil and optimizing converted areas, rather than clearing new land.
Although farmers often operate within regulatory frameworks where they can legally clear native vegetation beyond reserve requirements. Given so, they face high opportunity costs of protecting standing vegetation and economic constraints that make adopting sustainable practices difficult, even with access to traditional credit.
Without coordinated private-sector action, market incentives continue to favor conversion over conservation. SCF offers the opportunity to demonstrate that investing in native vegetation preservation and soil health enhances long-term farm resilience, land value, and market readiness.
The Business Case for Farmers
SCF actions, primarily through FFC, generate tangible results for producers: direct financial incentives to farmers who preserve surplus Legal Reserve (beyond legal requirements); specialized technical assistance for transitioning to regenerative agriculture practices and implementing integrated productions systems; technical support for environmental regularization and compliance with the Brazilian Forest Code (CAR); improved market reputation and strengthened commercial ties with the supply chain, ensuring access to markets that require DCF soy; and access to peer learning networks and new technical knowledge that increase farm resilience to climate shocks.
The Solution
SCF turns fragmented company-level commitments into a shared, verifiable sector standard decoupling soybean production from deforestation and conversion (DCF), built on three pillars:
- Monitoring Land Use: by offering standardized transparency and risk management frameworks across strategic ecosystems.
- Traceability and Transparent Reporting: By building on rigorous standards, methodologies, and monitoring tools, SCF member companies provide clear, data-backed transparency on supply chain dynamics, fostering cross-sector trust.
- Landscape Transformation: Our action-driven landscape intervention strategy connects data to direct investments. Through the FFC, we implement concrete financial incentives, technical assistance, and co-funding mechanisms that actively support producers in adopting regenerative practices and preserving native vegetation.
Our members
Contact us
Interested in learning more about the work of the Soft Commodities Forum? Or maybe you have a question? We would love to hear from you. Contact us at SCF, Stephan Freundt, Juliana Lopes
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