Is soy farming causing deforestation?

The objection

“Vegans and their tofu are what’s flattening the Amazon. Soy causes more deforestation than cattle.”

The answer

Soy farming has cleared millions of hectares of forest and savanna in South America, so the objection starts from something real. It goes wrong on two counts, since cattle pasture has cleared far more forest than soy and most of the world’s soy is fed to farm animals.

Does soy cause more deforestation than cattle?

Cattle cause far more: worldwide from 2001 to 2022, pasture took more than two and a half times as much forest as soy, oil palm and every other oil crop combined. Singh and Persson (2026), covering 179 countries, traced 121.8 million hectares of deforestation to what was produced on the cleared land [1]. Pasture, mainly for beef, accounted for about 42% of that area, and oilseeds and oil fruits, chiefly oil palm and soy, for 16% [1]. Because the study credits each cleared hectare to what was produced on it in the years after clearing, it leaves out the indirect part soy plays, set out below, when soy farmers buy or rent cleared pasture and the ranchers move on to new forest [1][3]. Numerous studies of the Brazilian Amazon have found pasture for beef the main driver and soy a smaller one (Our World in Data, 2021) [2].

Who eats the world’s soy?

Farm animals eat most of it, with 77% of the world’s soy fed to livestock in 2018, above all poultry (37%) and pigs (about a fifth), and only 2% going to beef and dairy cattle (Our World in Data, 2021) [2]. About a fifth was eaten by people, mostly as soybean oil, leaving just 7% for tofu, soy milk, tempeh and edamame [2]. Those foods did not drive soy’s growth either, since from 1990 to 2016 processed soy (feed cake, oil and biofuel) tripled from about 90 million to nearly 270 million tonnes, while foods such as tofu and soy milk rose by about 3 million tonnes [2].

Soy is sometimes said to be grown for its oil, with feed as a by-product, but the protein-rich cake makes up about two-thirds of a crushed bean’s value, and Oxford’s Food Climate Research Network (2020) judged it likely that demand for feed has mainly driven soy’s growth, with demand for vegetable oil helping it along [3]. Poore and Nemecek (2018) found that animal feed, particularly soy, maize and pasture, accounts for 67% of the deforestation caused by agriculture [5].

How much forest has soy farming cleared?

Soy replaced about 7.9 million hectares of forest worldwide between 2001 and 2015, mainly in Brazil and Argentina, against 45.1 million hectares for cattle pasture, according to the World Resources Institute, an environmental research non-profit (2021) [4]. That figure shows only where soy was planted on land cleared in those years, and WRI says it cannot capture indirect effects, such as one crop’s expansion pushing another into forest [4]. Those effects matter for soy, because ranchers often clear land and then sell or rent it for soy, which pays more, so soy can push cattle ranching further into the forest (Food Climate Research Network, 2020) [3]. Trase, a supply-chain research group, reported in 2018 that of the land growing soy in 2015, 40% in the Amazon (1.8 million hectares) and 20% in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna (3.5 million hectares) had been native vegetation in 2000, though the Food Climate Research Network notes that this does not measure soy’s own role precisely [3].

The direct link can be cut. After the big traders signed Brazil’s Amazon Soy Moratorium in 2006, agreeing not to buy soy from newly cleared Amazon land, the share of soy expansion there that replaced forest fell from 30% in the two years before to 1% by 2014 (Our World in Data, 2021) [2]. Production shifted to the Cerrado instead, often at the expense of forests there, and Our World in Data’s figures show only 13% of Brazil’s soy coming from the Amazon by 2015, against 48% from the Cerrado [2]. In January 2026 the big traders, through their association ABIOVE, withdrew from the moratorium after a law in Mato Grosso, one of Brazil’s top soy-producing states, took tax breaks and access to public land away from companies signed up to it [6][7]. In August 2026 Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld such state laws, while also finding the pact itself constitutional, and ABIOVE said the ruling was unlikely to revive it [7].

Would going vegan mean growing more soy?

Going vegan would mean growing less soy, because eating it directly skips the animal. In Poore and Nemecek’s data (2018), most farm animals eat more than twice as much protein in their feed as they return as edible protein [5], and the Food Climate Research Network (2020) judged that this saving would likely outweigh the extra work some food soy, such as edamame, takes to grow [3]. How much land that would free, and whether it went back to forest, would also depend on politics and economics [3]. Our World in Data’s review (2021) concluded that, since most deforestation comes from pasture for beef or soy for poultry and pigs, eating less meat is an effective way for consumers to make a difference [2].