Rainforest deforestation is driven overwhelmingly by agriculture, which accounts for 90 to 99% of tropical forest loss globally. But the specific causes vary widely by region, ranging from industrial cattle ranching in the Amazon to small-scale farming in Central Africa to palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia. In 2024, tropical primary forest loss reached 6.7 million hectares, nearly the size of Panama, at a rate of 18 soccer fields every minute.
Agriculture Is the Dominant Driver
Across the tropics, agriculture is responsible for the vast majority of deforestation, though the picture is more nuanced than it first appears. While 90 to 99% of tropical deforestation occurs in landscapes where agriculture drives forest loss, only about 45 to 65% of that cleared land actually becomes productive farmland. The rest is abandoned, degraded, or used in ways that don’t show up as active agriculture.
Among agricultural causes, pasture expansion for livestock is the single largest factor, accounting for roughly half of all agriculture-driven tropical deforestation worldwide. Oil palm and soy cultivation together make up at least a fifth. Six other crops fill in much of the remainder: rubber, cocoa, coffee, rice, maize, and cassava. The balance between these crops shifts dramatically depending on the region.
Cattle Ranching in the Amazon
In the Amazon, the math is stark: cattle ranching accounts for 80% of current deforestation. Soybean farming is the second major driver. Brazil’s Amazon region has been particularly affected, where vast stretches of forest are cleared and converted to pastureland. Much of this land is relatively unproductive per hectare compared to the ecological value of the forest it replaces, but cheap land prices and growing global demand for beef keep the cycle going.
The pattern often follows a predictable sequence. Loggers move in first and extract the most valuable hardwoods. Ranchers follow, clearing and burning what remains to establish pasture. After a few years, the soil quality degrades, and ranchers push deeper into the forest to repeat the process. This frontier-style expansion has reshaped enormous areas of the eastern and southern Amazon over the past several decades.
Palm Oil in Southeast Asia
Indonesia and Malaysia produce 85% of the world’s palm oil, and the environmental cost has been enormous. More than 3.7 million hectares of natural forest in these two countries alone have been cleared for palm oil plantations, most of it in the last 20 years. Palm oil is found in roughly half of all packaged products in supermarkets, from food to cosmetics to cleaning supplies, which makes demand extremely difficult to reduce.
The forests replaced by palm oil plantations are often peatland forests, which store massive amounts of carbon in their waterlogged soils. When these forests are drained and cleared, the exposed peat decomposes and burns easily, releasing stored carbon and creating thick haze that blankets the region for weeks at a time. This makes palm oil deforestation disproportionately damaging from a climate perspective relative to the area of forest lost.
Smallholder Farming in the Congo Basin
The Congo Basin, home to the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, faces a very different set of pressures. An estimated 84% of forest disturbance in the region comes from small-scale, nonmechanized clearing for agriculture. This isn’t industrial farming. It’s millions of families clearing small plots to grow food for survival.
Annual rates of small-scale clearing in primary forests and woodlands doubled between 2000 and 2014, closely tracking population growth. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone accounted for nearly two-thirds of total forest loss in the basin. Selective logging is the second most significant driver, contributing about 10% of regional forest disturbance. In Gabon, logging accounts for more than 60% of disturbance area, reflecting that country’s timber-oriented economy. The challenge in this region is that reducing deforestation means addressing deep poverty and food insecurity, not just corporate supply chains.
Roads and Infrastructure
Roads are one of the most underappreciated causes of rainforest loss. A new road through intact forest doesn’t just clear a narrow strip of trees. It opens up previously inaccessible land to logging, mining, land speculation, hunting, and settlement. In frontier regions, new roads reliably trigger a cascade of unplanned destruction.
Paved highways are especially damaging because they provide year-round access and reduce transportation costs. Unpaved roads become impassable in the wet season, which limits their impact. Paved routes attract land speculators who buy up cheap forest land and resell it for development. Perhaps most critically, major highways spawn networks of secondary roads that spread deforestation far beyond the original corridor. The 2,000-kilometer Belém-Brasília highway, completed in the early 1970s, has evolved into a spider web of secondary roads and a 400-kilometer-wide swath of forest destruction across the eastern Brazilian Amazon.
Illegal and Legal Logging
Logging directly destroys forest, but its indirect effects may be even worse. Logging roads open up remote areas to settlers and farmers, and selective logging degrades the canopy enough to dry out the forest floor, making it more vulnerable to fire. A significant share of tropical timber on the global market is illegally harvested. In the Brazilian Amazon, illegal harvesting represented 35 to 72% of all logging at the time of a major Chatham House study. In Ghana, the figure was 59 to 65%. Indonesia ranged from 40 to 61%.
Even legal, selective logging changes forest structure in ways that compound over time. Removing the largest trees opens gaps in the canopy, increases wind penetration, and reduces humidity at ground level. These changes make logged forests more susceptible to drought stress and fire, which can convert them from dense rainforest to degraded scrubland.
Mining and Resource Extraction
Gold mining has become a growing driver of deforestation, particularly in the Amazon. Illegal mining operations clear forest, strip topsoil, and contaminate rivers with mercury used to separate gold from sediment. The scale is expanding rapidly. Between 2021 and 2022, in the area near Colombia’s Amacayacu National Natural Park on the border with Brazil, the number of mining rafts increased by 150% on the Colombian side and 410% on the Brazilian side.
Mining damage extends well beyond the cleared area itself. Mercury pollution travels downstream, accumulating in fish and eventually in the communities that depend on river fish as a primary protein source. The deforested and contaminated land left behind by mining operations is extremely difficult to restore, making this one of the more permanent forms of forest loss.
Fire and Climate Feedbacks
Tropical rainforests are not naturally fire-prone. High humidity, dense canopy cover, and limited dry fuel on the forest floor historically prevented fires from igniting or spreading. But deforestation and climate change are rewriting those rules. As forests are fragmented and edges dry out, fire becomes possible in places it never was before.
Projections suggest fire frequency could rise by 44% in the Amazon, 80% in the Congo, and 123% in Indonesia, driven by the combination of deforestation and climate variability. Reduced rainfall and increased wind speeds lower fuel moisture and help flames spread faster, producing larger and more severe fires. Once a section of rainforest burns, it becomes more flammable, not less. Recurrent fires promote vegetation that is progressively drier and less capable of re-establishing canopy structure. This creates a feedback loop where each fire makes the next one more likely, gradually converting rainforest into grassland or scrub without anyone actively clearing it.
In 2021, 141 countries committed at the Glasgow climate summit to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. The 2024 data, showing tropical primary forest loss nearly doubling compared to the previous year, suggests the world is moving in the opposite direction.