Brazilian federal officials shut down one of Cargill’s deep river grain ports along the Amazon River this past Saturday. Due to their failure to submit a credible Environmental Impact Statement to the government, the agribusiness giant based out of Minnetonka, MI, will be forced to close down its “soy port” while it appeals the court decision.

It was a big step in the right direction. Brazil has done a fantastic job in setting aside huge swaths of land as “protected” but their weakness is their inability to patrol and manage that land, leaving it wide open for poaching, deforestation and a wild-west-type scenario between loggers, land-grabbers, farmers and other interests. What this move does is show a concerted effort on the Brazilian government’s part to start enforcing a responsible use ethic when it comes to the country’s natural resources.

Soybeans are Brazil’s “most lucrative agricultural export,” and massive agricultural corporations like Cargill know it. For the past decade they have been setting up for a massive extraction process that will reap huge financial rewards. However, it will also reap everlasting environmental devastation, especially to the biodiversity of the rainforest ecosystem. This port, in Satarem, Para, Brazil, is a key component in Cargill’s effort to gain more access to the soy coming out of the country.

In the past two decades, farming, development and logging have been the key contributors to rainforest deforestation. But now, for the first time, there seems to be a direct correlation between a crop’s price and the rate at which Amazon rainforest is being destroyed:

Environmentalists say deforestation has slowed largely because the price of soybeans has declined on the international market and Brazil’s currency has strengthened against the dollar, making it much less profitable for now to cut down the rain forest to plant grain.

The rain forest covers 60 percent of Brazil. Experts say as much as 20 percent of its 1.6 million square miles has already been destroyed by development, logging and farming.

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More can definitely be done. Putting more manpower behind patrolling giant expanses of rainforest is probably the more difficult choice. But pressuring companies like Cargill and Monsanto to adopt their own third-party process in who they accept soy from, examine their own footprints in a region embattled with farmers, indigenous communities, corporate giants and loggers could help steer this region from utter devastation and back on the track toward sustainable biodiversity.