India halted potash imports and postponed negotiations around next year’s imports until June 2016 due to weak demand caused by drought. Potash is a crop nutrient that is used to fertilize farmland. This is India’s first halting of potash imports in years and comes alongside decreased demand from China and Brazil as well. India’s major suppliers of potash include Uralkali, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, and Arab PotashCo. Even with this decision, India has 1.1 million tons in potash inventory, which highlights the crisis that India’s farm sector is experiencing.

Construction of the third largest dam in the world, Brazil's Belo Monte dam, is complete but a judge suspended its operating license. Judge Maria Carolina Valente de Carmo ruled that the dam must fulfill obligations that it made in 2010 to the region’s indigenous groups before the dam can begin generating electricity. The dam is located on the Xingu River in the Amazon and was just weeks away from beginning operation.

On January 13, 2016, Brazil’s police force charged the CEO of Samarco, Ricardo Vescovi De Aragao, with causing Brazil’s largest environmental disaster in violation of the nation's Environmental Crimes Law. On November 5, 2015, a Samarco dam burst, which caused an avalanche of 2.2 billion cubic feet of waste and mud. Both the Samarco and Vale mining companies were indicted, in addition to VogBR Recursos Hidricos e Geotecnica, the company responsible for declaring that the dam was stable earlier in 2015.

Norway announced that it will pay Brazil’s Amazon Fund $1 billion USD by the end of the year. This payment fulfills a pledge that Norway made to Brazil in 2008 to compensate deforestation reduction. Norway made another $1 billion USD pledge to Indonesia in 2008, but Indonesia’s efforts have fallen short. Brazil’s accomplishments were commended by the Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment, as well as by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

In a joint announcement with the United States, Brazil announced its plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions in preparation for United Nations climate negotiations in Paris later this year. Details of the plan include doubling electrical generation from renewable sources to 20% of the nation's power by 2030 and restoring 30 million acres of Amazonian rainforest. Though the plan has yet to be submitted to the U.N., commentators have praised the announcement for bringing another major economy into the fold.

The Brazilian government announced on Tuesday, October 21, the designation of a new federal reserve in the Amazon rainforest encompassing an area the size of Delaware. The new Alto Maues Reserve will confer federal protection from deforestation to 668,000 hectares of pristine forest, most of which has been untouched by human presence, according to the Brazilian Environment Ministry. The area contains hundreds of species of animals and 13 primate species, several of which are considered threatened with extinction.

A recently released Greenpeace report, Amazon's Silent Crisis: Night Terrors, documents illegal logging in protected public forest areas of the Brazilian Amazon. The report also identifies mechanisms by which loggers launder illegal timber and access markets in countries with laws prohibiting the import of illegally harvested timber, including the United States and the EU. Using GPS, Greenpeace activists tracked trucks used to transport illegal timber at night, a tactic that was complemented by the use of satellite imagery to identify areas of illegal logging.

A new study published by Brazilian NGO Imazon estimates that a plan to build a dozen dams on Brazil’s Tapajós river basin would drive the loss of an additional 950,000 hectares of rainforest by 2032. The dams planned for the Tapajós river, a tributary of the Amazon River, are part of a larger government plan for 30 large hydroelectric projects in the Amazon. The study analyzes forest loss beyond the losses that would be directly incurred from flooding and road construction, by considering the deforestation impacts of resulting land speculation and migration.

A bill to end the moratorium on genetically modified “terminator” seeds could pass Brazil’s national Congress as early as Tuesday, December 17, spurring unease among farmers and environmentalists. These “suicide seeds” cause crops to die off after one harvest without producing offspring, increasing farmers’ dependence on seed and chemical companies as they are forced to buy new seeds for each planting.

Last Thursday, the Brazilian government released figures showing that deforestation in the Amazon increased by 28 percent between August 2012 and last July. Over the past decade, the country has made progress against the destruction of the rainforest, and in 2009 the government committed to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent by 2020. Last year, Brazil saw the lowest rate of deforestation since monitoring began, but the newly released figures cause activists to fear that that trend might have reversed.