China, which accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population but controls less than 9 percent of its arable lands, adds millions of citizens to its middle class each year. Consumption of meat was once considered a rare luxury for Chinese citizens. But with higher incomes, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports that the China now consumes more than a quarter of the world’s meat, and that figure is set to increase.

In 2018, Brazil sold China 70 percent of its soy exports, or over $27 billion in 2018 — a value increase of 90 percent compared with 2016. China is also the largest buyer of Brazilian beef, fueling Brazil’s transformation into an agribusiness colossus that controls an astonishing 6 percent of the global food trade.

International agribusiness companies looking to expand their food exports to China have heavily invested in some of the least-developed Brazilian regions, resulting in the transformation of former jungle areas into wealthy cities. While Brazilian farmers, looking to take advantage of the demand brought about by Chinese tariffs on United States soybeans and the country’s rising meat consumption, set fires to clear land for growing crops and cattle .

Cattle ranching in Brazil and soy cultivation, are the largest drivers of deforestation. According to official preliminary data, deforestation grew a staggering 93 percent during the first nine months of Mr. Bolsonaro’s presidency compared with the same period in the previous year. In September alone, deforestation rates surged 96 percent compared with the same month in 2018.

Pressured by a fading popularity and an unnerved agribusiness sector fearing commercial retaliations from European countries, Mr. Bolsonaro deployed the Brazilian Army to the Amazon to implement a 60-day ban on burning. But as a former Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources official recently told me: “What could the whole Brazilian Army and, eventually, its 300,000 men do in a region spanning five million square kilometers? Would they be able to effectively fight deforestation? Only the market can solve this.”