Agriculture is the main direct cause of deforestation worldwide, responsible for over 90% of global forest loss. Between 2001 and 2022, agricultural and forestry commodity production cleared roughly 122 million hectares of forest, releasing over 41 billion metric tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere.
But “agriculture” covers a wide range of activity, from massive cattle ranches in the Amazon to small family farms in Central Africa. The specific type of agriculture driving deforestation varies dramatically by region, and understanding those differences matters if you want the full picture.
Cattle Ranching Dominates in the Amazon
In South America, cattle ranching is the single largest driver of forest clearing. Across the Amazon basin, it accounts for roughly 80% of deforestation. The process is straightforward: forest is cut and burned to create pastureland for livestock. Much of this land is used extensively, meaning relatively few cattle graze on large areas, which makes the conversion especially wasteful in terms of forest lost per unit of food produced.
This pattern repeats across virtually every Amazon country, making beef production the defining force behind the Amazon’s shrinking forest cover. Soy production also plays a significant role in South America, with large areas of forest and savanna converted to cropland to grow animal feed for export markets.
Palm Oil and Plantation Crops in Southeast Asia
In Indonesia, the expansion of oil palm plantations has been a major deforestation driver for two decades, accounting for about one-third of the country’s old-growth forest loss (around 3 million hectares). The good news is that the rate has dropped significantly: annual deforestation for industrial palm oil fell to about 32,400 hectares per year between 2018 and 2022, only 18% of its peak a decade earlier.
Rubber plantations are another contributor across Southeast Asia, along with other commodity crops grown for global markets. These plantation-driven losses tend to be large-scale and permanent. Once tropical forest is replaced by a monoculture plantation, the original ecosystem is essentially gone.
Small-Scale Farming Drives Loss in Africa
Africa’s deforestation story looks very different. Small-scale cropland is the dominant driver, responsible for 64% of the continent’s total forest loss between 2001 and 2020. This isn’t industrial agriculture. It’s millions of families clearing patches of forest to grow food for their households.
The concentration is striking in certain countries. In Madagascar, small-scale farming accounted for 88% of forest loss. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was 85%. Burundi, Comoros, Malawi, Angola, and Mozambique all exceeded 74%. These numbers reflect populations with limited access to agricultural technology or fertile land, pushing farming into forested areas out of necessity rather than commercial ambition.
Commodity crops like cacao, cashew, oil palm, rubber, and coffee made up about 7% of Africa’s forest loss overall, but they dominate in the humid forests of western and central Africa. Large-scale cropland accounted for another 9%, with the highest proportions in countries like Cape Verde, Gambia, and Sudan.
How Logging Fits the Picture
Logging is often assumed to be a primary cause of deforestation, but the reality is more nuanced. Selective logging, where crews remove a handful of commercially valuable tree species per hectare, typically degrades forests rather than eliminating them outright. In the eastern Brazilian Amazon, initial logging removes 3 to 9 trees per hectare from the roughly 100 species with commercial value.
The damage, however, goes well beyond those few trees. A single logging operation can reduce canopy cover and tree density by 20 to 40% while tripling the amount of dry woody debris on the forest floor. That debris becomes fuel for ground fires, which further weaken the forest. This creates a cycle: logging opens the canopy, the forest dries out, fires move in, and each disturbance makes the next one worse. The result is a degraded forest that sits somewhere between intact and cleared, even though it still counts as “forest” in national accounting systems.
So logging rarely causes deforestation directly in the way that clearing land for cattle does. Instead, it acts as the first step in a process that often ends with the forest being converted to farmland or pasture.
Infrastructure, Mining, and Urban Growth
Compared to agriculture, other direct causes of deforestation are relatively minor at the global scale, though they can be devastating locally.
Mining and related activities destroyed nearly 1.4 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2020, roughly the size of Montenegro. That sounds large, but it’s small next to the 130 million hectares lost to forestry operations and 90 million hectares burned by wildfire over the same period. Mining’s indirect effects, like access roads punched through remote forests, aren’t captured in those numbers and can open previously inaccessible areas to further clearing.
Urban expansion contributes even less in direct terms. Projected urban growth in tropical regions between 2000 and 2030 accounts for roughly 5% of tropical deforestation emissions. Cities do consume forest, but the footprint is modest compared to the vast areas converted for food production.
Direct Causes vs. Underlying Drivers
Researchers distinguish between “proximate causes” and “underlying drivers” of deforestation. Proximate causes are the activities that physically remove trees: clearing land for crops, cutting timber, building roads. Underlying drivers are the economic and social forces that make those activities happen in the first place: population growth, global demand for commodities, government policies, land tenure systems, poverty, and even armed conflict.
In Myanmar, for example, proximate causes include agricultural expansion, timber extraction, and infrastructure development. But these are fueled by formal government concessions for logging, mining, and hydropower, along with economic pressures tied to civil war and insecure land rights. The chainsaw is the proximate cause. The reason someone picks it up is the underlying driver.
Global monitoring efforts have traditionally focused on a handful of high-profile commodities: cattle, palm oil, rubber, soy, cocoa, and coffee. Recent research published in Nature highlights that staple crops like rice, maize, and cassava have been largely overlooked as deforestation drivers, even though they collectively account for significant forest loss, particularly in regions where subsistence farming dominates.