Frontier Dependence in Brazil’s Commodity Exports: Comparing Brazil’s Legal Amazon Sourcing for the EU and China in Light of the EU–Mercosur Partnership Agreement

This study investigates the spatial exposure of Brazil’s Legal Amazon (BLA) as the deforestation frontier, operationalized as Brazil’s legally defined Amazon Legal administrative region, in Brazil’s commodity exports to its two largest partners: the European Union (EU) and China. Focusing on agricultural, forestry and mining commodity groups, a destination-specific Relative Concentration Ratio (RCR) and Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) on physical trade data (2002–2024) were used to examine whether contrasting trade governance logics—the regulatory “Brussels Effect” and the scale-driven “Beijing Effect”—are associated with different sourcing geographies from the BLA frontier. We test three competing expectations: EU spatial avoidance, higher Chinese frontier dependence, and compliance-driven consolidation. The results reveal a counterintuitive paradox: despite stricter sustainability governance, the EU displays persistently higher frontier dependence than China in key commodity groups, with RCR trajectories indicating stabilization rather than spatial avoidance. In contrast, China’s frontier dependence declines over time in selected sectors even as import volumes expand substantially, highlighting that changes in frontier exposure cannot be inferred from trade scale alone. CAGR patterns further show strong growth in China-related trade at the national level across commodity groups, alongside sector-specific frontier dynamics within BLA. Overall, the findings provide the strongest support for the consolidation hypothesis: compliance and traceability requirements—public and private—may concentrate EU-linked sourcing among highly auditable, capitalized producers embedded in established frontier zones. These results imply that without explicit spatial targeting, demand-side regulations such as the EUDR may improve product-level assurances yet fail to induce a geographic shift away from deforestation frontiers, potentially reinforcing trade links with established producers in high-risk regions.