Cow and bull flesh production accounted for 41% of global deforestation between 2001 and 2023, and almost two thirds of that forest loss took place in Brazil, according to an analysis published by Our World in Data. Taken together, those figures mean a quarter of all deforestation recorded worldwide over the two decades can be traced to meat from Brazilian cows and bulls on its own.
Pasture expansion in the country has come at the expense of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna, two of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Author Hannah Ritchie notes that narrowing the analysis to only the most recent years produces a comparable result, showing the pattern is not simply a legacy of clearing rates from the early 2000s.
Trade-adjusted modelling covering 2005 to 2023 attributes roughly 85% of the deforestation embodied in Brazilian agricultural production to domestic consumption, with the remaining 15% spread across many destination markets. China and the US are the largest importers, though no single buyer dominates. Brazilian per capita cow and bull flesh consumption has doubled over the past 50 years and now runs at around three times the European average.
The underlying data comes from the Deforestation Driver and Carbon Emission (DeDuCE) model, developed by Chandrakant Singh and Martin Persson at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and published in Nature Food in February 2026, with an updated dataset released the following month. It combines satellite land-cover data with agricultural statistics across 184 commodities in 179 countries, producing more than 9,300 country-commodity footprints, and found that agriculture-driven deforestation released roughly 41 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2001 and 2022, around 5% of total global carbon dioxide emissions over that period.
Martin Persson, Chalmers University of Technology, said, “The debate on deforestation has circulated a lot around how people in rich countries like ours cause deforestation with our commodities imports, and this is absolutely important to get to grips with. But we mustn’t forget that a large proportion of deforestation is driven by agricultural production for domestic markets. So to really reduce deforestation, we must also take action in the producer countries.”
