Doesn't soy farming cause more deforestation than cattle?
Short answer: No. 77% of the world's soy is fed to livestock and only ~7% is eaten directly by humans, and cattle pasture is the top driver of tropical deforestation.
Eat the animal and you inherit the deforestation footprint of every kilogram of soy it ate, far more than you'd ever eat directly.
Our World in Data, Soy
The objection
“Vegans and their tofu are what’s flattening the Amazon. Soy causes more deforestation than cattle.”
The answer
Start with the true part: soy expansion really has driven deforestation, especially in the Amazon and the Cerrado. The rest collapses the moment you follow the soy to its eater.
It’s eaten by animals. Around 77% of the world’s soy is fed to livestock, mostly poultry and pigs, plus farmed fish and cattle. Only about 7% goes directly to human food like tofu, tempeh, soy milk and edamame; most of the remainder becomes oil and industrial products. The soy fields cut from forest exist overwhelmingly to fatten animals, and because of feed-conversion losses, eating the animal consumes far more soy than eating the bean ever would. Cutting out animal products reduces soy demand.
And on the headline comparison, soy isn’t even the lead culprit. Cattle pasture is the single largest driver of tropical deforestation. Our World in Data attributes roughly 41% of tropical deforestation to pasture expansion for beef, against about 18% for all oilseeds (soy and palm combined). Beef alone accounts for around a quarter of all tropical forest loss.
The objection points a real finger at the wrong hand. Soy deforestation is real, and most of it is livestock deforestation under another name. If you want to fight it, the single most effective step is to stop eating the animals that consume three-quarters of the world’s soy.