As Brazil cracks down on the illegal clearing of forests, farmers and ranchers are moving into Bolivia, helping to fuel a wave of deforestation in a country where land is cheap and enforcement lax.
As Bolivia faces high inflation, waning revenues from natural gas, and widespread unrest, the government is looking to soybeans and other commodity crops to drive growth, Bloomberg reports. A recent influx of growers from Brazil and other countries has expanded the agricultural footprint, at the expense of native forests.
In Bolivia, the acreage of original vegetation lost yearly has nearly doubled, increasing from less than 900,000 acres in 2022 to nearly 1.8 million acres in 2024, a record high, according to data from MapBiomas.
While Brazil has stepped up monitoring and enforcement, Bolivia is still "in the first stages" of forming conservation policy, Stasiek Czaplicki, a Bolivian economist, told Bloomberg. Bolivia has imposed few constraints on the clearing of forest. According to one estimate, the production of one ton of soy in Bolivia is associated with seven times more deforestation than the same amount in Brazil.
In Brazil, deforestation in 2026 is on track to hit its lowest level since 1988. The sharp decline comes amid a push to stem the clearing of forest by miners, loggers, and farmers under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who returned to office in 2023. Brazil is aiming for net zero deforestation by the end of this decade.
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