Read: The Amazon cannot be recovered once it’s gone

This dynamic highlights some of the tensions inherent in the challenge of combatting climate change. China’s middle class has a growing hunger for meat, leading to a rise in demand for soy. For a country that has pledged to honor the Paris Agreement, China’s food-security measures run counter to its environmental efforts, yet while the climate deal aims to reduce national carbon emissions, it doesn’t account for the activities and responsibilities of signatories in other countries. And Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, argues that the country must prioritize economic growth, even if it comes at the cost of destroying the planet’s largest tropical rain forest.

Sinop, a prosperous community of 140,000 in northern Mato Grosso and a hub of industrial agriculture, epitomizes this transformation. The place is in a scrappy developmental stage—Burger King held its grand opening here recently, and a McDonald’s is on its way—but is also an advanced economy with paved, gated communities of millionaire farmers’ homes built to tasteful, mid-century-modern designs. Along with the soy and cattle, a sprawling city has displaced lush jungle, butting right up against the wilderness, and the residents are proud of it.

“We are champions of soy and cattle,” Daniel Brolese brags. China’s “demand is what reassures farmers here.” Brolese, the deputy mayor for economic affairs, drives us through the streets, pointing out private tennis and beach-volleyball courts. On the driveways sit luxury cars, from a Corvette Stingray to a Porsche Cayenne. Periodically, he pauses his tour to focus on a new project he says would catapult Sinop further, and help push more exports to China. “Ferrogrão,” he says, “is no question important to development.”

He’s referring to a railway that producers have long dreamed of: Ferrogrão—the “grain train,” in Portuguese—would transport soy from the Amazon’s interior to its northern river ports along the Tapajós River and then to the Atlantic Ocean. Long desired by agribusinesses and officials here, the project never had the political and financial capital necessary from the federal government to move forward—opponents argued that it cost too much and benefited too few. But two things have come together that might finally make Ferrogrão a reality: Bolsonaro’s election, and China.

Bolsonaro’s first year in power has been characterized by rewards for some of his biggest campaign backers in Big Ag. Like Donald Trump, the populist Brazilian leader swept to power in part with the support of the farm lobby, and Bolsonaro appears to view the environment primarily as a resource, pointing to the hypocrisy of developed countries’ own histories to justify his strategy in the Amazon. He has dismantled environmental-protection laws, replaced dozens of Environment Ministry officials with political cronies, and drastically cut the budget for law enforcement in the jungle. He has accused the indigenous groups who are working to preserve the Amazon of holding broader economic prosperity hostage. Tribes we met along our journey told us they are bracing for battle. In the eyes of environmentalists, Bolsonaro’s presidency has literally fueled deforestation—they blame his laissez-faire permissiveness for last summer’s extraordinary fires. December saw a 183 percent spike in the rate of deforestation compared to the same month a year prior.