Brazil is the Latin American country most closely associated with deforestation, and it isn’t close. In 2024, Brazil accounted for 42% of all tropical primary forest loss worldwide, making it the single largest contributor to deforestation on the planet. No other country in the region, or the world, loses as much forest in absolute terms.
Why Brazil Dominates the Numbers
Brazil contains more tropical primary forest than any other country, most of it in the Amazon basin. That sheer scale partly explains the outsized loss figures, but the rate of clearing has also been exceptionally high for decades. Between August 2024 and July 2025, Brazil’s national space research agency (INPE) recorded 5,796 square kilometers of deforestation in the Amazon alone, an area roughly three times the size of London.
The primary driver is cattle ranching. Clearing land for pasture accounts for about 80% of all forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon, making it by far the dominant force behind deforestation. Ranchers clear forest, burn the vegetation, and convert the land to grazing. Soy cultivation is the second-largest driver across South America. Between 2000 and 2020, soy expansion directly converted roughly 3.4 million hectares of native vegetation across the continent, with another 2.9 million hectares cleared first for pasture and then flipped to soy within about three years. The state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s largest soy-producing region, sits at the intersection of the Amazon and the Cerrado savanna, and has experienced intense clearing in both ecosystems.
Recent Policy Shifts in Brazil
Brazil’s deforestation trajectory has not been a straight line upward. Political leadership makes a measurable difference. Under strengthened enforcement in recent years, Amazon deforestation fell by 11% in the 2024-2025 monitoring period compared to the year before. Similar reductions were recorded in the Cerrado, a vast tropical savanna south and east of the Amazon that stores enormous amounts of carbon underground and supports its own rich biodiversity. These declines show that policy tools like satellite monitoring, fines for illegal clearing, and restrictions on land registration can slow forest loss when they are actually enforced.
That progress, however, hasn’t changed Brazil’s overall ranking. Even with reductions, the country still loses more primary forest each year than any other nation in the tropics.
Bolivia’s Rapid Rise
While Brazil gets the most attention, Bolivia has emerged as a serious deforestation hotspot. In 2024, Bolivia’s primary forest loss skyrocketed by 200%, reaching 1.5 million hectares. For the first time since global tracking began, Bolivia ranked second in the world for tropical primary forest loss, surpassing the Democratic Republic of the Congo despite having only 40% of its forest area. Much of this spike was driven by fires set to clear land for agriculture, particularly in the country’s lowland east.
Other Countries to Know About
Several other Latin American nations contribute significantly to regional forest loss, each with distinct patterns.
Paraguay has quietly lost enormous stretches of forest in the Gran Chaco, a dry forest and scrubland region in the western part of the country. Between 2000 and 2023, Paraguay lost more than 6.6 million hectares of native forest, with 88% of that loss concentrated in the Chaco. Annual clearing actually accelerated over time, rising from about 255,000 hectares per year in the early 2000s to over 316,000 hectares per year between 2005 and 2022. A 2004 “Zero Deforestation Law” effectively protected the eastern region but pushed clearing westward into the Chaco.
Colombia lost 81,396 hectares of primary forest in the Colombian Amazon in 2024, a nearly 50% increase over the prior year. Deforestation follows a persistent “arc” across the northwestern Amazon, concentrated in the departments of Caquetá, Meta, Putumayo, and Guaviare, where armed conflict, coca cultivation, and cattle ranching overlap.
Peru faces a distinctive threat from gold mining. Total mining-related deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon has reached about 139,000 hectares, with 97.5% of it concentrated in the Madre de Dios region of southern Peru. Small-scale and artisanal miners strip forest cover and dig open pits along river systems, leaving behind landscapes too contaminated with mercury to recover naturally.
Mexico and Nicaragua both entered the global top 10 for tropical primary forest loss in 2024, driven in part by fire activity that accelerated land conversion.
What Drives Deforestation Across the Region
The specifics vary by country, but a few forces show up everywhere. Cattle ranching is the leading cause of forest clearing across Latin America, followed by soy and other commodity crops. In the Amazon basin specifically, the pattern is predictable: forest is cleared and burned, used as low-productivity pasture for several years, and in some cases later converted to cropland. Road construction opens new frontiers, land speculators claim territory illegally, and enforcement is weakest in remote border areas.
Fire is both a tool and a threat. Farmers and ranchers use fire deliberately to clear vegetation, but in dry years those fires escape and burn far beyond their intended boundaries. The record-breaking global forest loss in 2024, totaling 6.7 million hectares of tropical primary forest, was driven in large part by massive fires across Brazil, Bolivia, and other tropical nations.
Brazil’s overwhelming dominance in deforestation statistics reflects not just the size of its forests but the economic incentives that continue to push the agricultural frontier deeper into standing forest. As long as global demand for beef and soy remains high, and as long as land in forested regions is cheap and loosely regulated, the pressure to clear will persist across the region.