Agriculture drives roughly 80 to 90 percent of global deforestation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That figure makes farming and ranching, by a wide margin, the single largest cause of forest loss worldwide. But the real picture is more nuanced than one number suggests: the percentage shifts depending on how you define “agriculture-driven,” which forests you’re counting, and whether the cleared land actually ends up producing food.
Why the Estimates Vary So Much
If you search this question, you’ll find figures ranging from 26 percent to over 90 percent. That’s not because anyone is wrong. It’s because researchers measure different things. The FAO’s remote sensing survey estimates that agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation, with cropland accounting for more than half of that and livestock grazing responsible for nearly 40 percent. A 2026 study published in Nature, using a model called DeDuCE, found a much lower number: just 26 percent of global tree cover loss between 2001 and 2022 was driven by expansion of croplands, pastures, and forest plantations for commodity production.
The gap comes down to definitions. “Tree cover loss” includes temporary clearing from fires, logging, and shifting cultivation where forests eventually regrow. “Deforestation” typically means permanent conversion. When researchers in a Science study looked specifically at tropical forests from 2011 to 2015, they found that 90 to 99 percent of deforestation occurred in landscapes where agriculture was the dominant driver. But only 45 to 65 percent of that deforested land was converted into actively managed farmland within a few years. In other words, agriculture sets the process in motion, but a lot of cleared forest simply sits unused or degrades rather than becoming productive fields.
Cattle Ranching Is the Biggest Single Driver
Across the tropics, pasture expansion for cattle accounts for roughly half of all deforestation that results in agricultural production. Nowhere is this more visible than the Amazon, where cattle ranching is responsible for an estimated 80 percent of current forest loss. Brazil’s cattle herd, one of the largest in the world, has expanded steadily into forested land over decades. Soybean farming is the second major force in South America, often following cattle ranching into already-cleared areas.
This pattern is significant because it means a single commodity, beef, punches well above its weight in global deforestation. The cleared land often stays as pasture permanently. As one conservation ecologist put it, commodity-driven deforestation is essentially a permanent change: these areas will likely never be forests again.
Commercial Farming vs. Subsistence Farming
Not all agricultural deforestation looks the same. A global meta-analysis covering 1990 to 2023 found that commercial agriculture, including livestock operations, appeared as a driver in 83 percent of deforestation cases studied. Subsistence farming appeared in 50 percent of cases. These numbers overlap because multiple drivers often act on the same landscape simultaneously.
The distinction matters because the two types of farming clear forests in very different ways. Commodity crops like palm oil, soybeans, corn, and cotton are typically grown on an industrial scale and traded internationally. They involve permanent clear-cutting of large areas. Shifting agriculture, by contrast, involves families clearing small plots to grow a mix of vegetables, fruits, and grains for a few years before letting the land go fallow. These clearings are temporary, and forests can regrow. In Africa and Central America, shifting agriculture remains a major pattern of forest disturbance, while in South America and Southeast Asia, industrial commodity production dominates.
Regional Differences in What Gets Grown
The crop driving deforestation depends heavily on where you look. In South America, it’s beef and soy. In Southeast Asia, palm oil plantations have been the primary force behind forest loss in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. In West Africa, cocoa is a major culprit. A Nature study found that cocoa cultivation drove over 37 percent of forest loss in protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire and over 13 percent in Ghana. In the worst-affected regions of those countries, cocoa plantations covered more than 43 percent of the landscape, leaving almost no forested area in agricultural zones.
About three-quarters of agricultural expansion into forests is driven by domestic demand in the countries where it happens, not by international trade. Beef and cereals for local consumption account for much of the clearing across Africa and Latin America. This complicates the common narrative that global commodity markets are solely to blame. Export-oriented crops like palm oil and soy get the most attention, but food production for local populations is a larger piece of the puzzle than most people realize.
How Much Forest Is Lost Each Year
Synthesized estimates put agriculture-driven tropical deforestation at 6.4 to 8.8 million hectares per year during the 2011 to 2015 period. To put that in perspective, in 2020 alone the world lost about 4.2 million hectares of humid tropical primary forest, an area roughly the size of the Netherlands. Nearly half of that loss was tied to food production, and half of that specifically to commodity crops.
Between 2001 and 2022, the DeDuCE model estimated that commodity-driven clearing averaged 5.5 million hectares per year globally. That figure is lower than the FAO’s reported deforestation rate of 8 to 10 million hectares per year, though the gap has narrowed in recent years as measurement methods improve and deforestation patterns shift.
The Gap Between Clearing and Farming
One of the most striking findings in recent research is that a large share of land cleared in the name of agriculture never actually becomes productive farmland. Between one-third and one-half of agriculture-driven deforestation does not result in actively managed agricultural land. Some of it becomes degraded scrubland. Some is cleared speculatively for land claims or real estate value rather than farming. Some is abandoned after a few seasons when soil fertility drops.
This means the true agricultural footprint of deforestation is both larger and smaller than it appears. Agriculture is the reason forests get cut in the first place in the vast majority of cases, but the food system doesn’t fully “use” all the land it destroys. That wasted destruction represents both an ecological tragedy and, potentially, an opportunity: reducing speculative clearing and improving yields on already-farmed land could significantly slow the rate of forest loss without reducing food production.