Are The Foods You Eat Driving Deforestation?

By NAIVASHA DEAN, Causecast Editor   

By now, most of us are aware that changing our eating habits is one of the best ways to reduce our personal impact on the environment. We know that it’s good to eat organic and local, and cut out meat when we can.

But that may not be enough. As Planet Green points out in their article A Deforestation-Based Diet: Seven Foods That Are Destroying the World’s Forests, the growing methods of the foods we eat can be more important than what we’re eating. Around the world, thousands of acres of forest are being destroyed to grow or raise our food products, and the foods that have the most harmful impacts may be surprising.

Unsurprising, however, is the fact that beef is a huge contributor to deforestation because of how much land must be converted for cattle feeding. The worst news is that the cattle industry is growing rapidly in Brazil, which means the Amazon is losing acres faster than ever. For more info on how the cattle industry is driving this process, and how you can avoid contributing, check out our post on Amazon deforestation.

Another fairly obvious food contributor is rice, because land has to be stripped and irrigated to form rice paddies. A dangerous side effect are the millions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas, produced from the rice paddies that cover much of rural Asia and Africa.

One of the most infamous drivers of deforestation is particularly sinister because sometimes it can be impossible to tell whether or not you are consuming it. Palm oil, the world’s cheapest plant oil, is used in the majority of the world’s food and hygiene products. According to the Rainforest Action Network’s campaign against the massive deforestation that growing palm oil causes, it is best to avoid consuming palm oil.

More information on the problem with palm oil:

Some of the more unexpected foods that are contributing to deforestation are soy, shrimp and sugarcane. The demand for soy has spiked in recent years because it is used as feed for chickens, cows, and pigs in Europe. Vegetarians around the world also consume a lot of soy products.

Another one of the article’s saddening revelations is that the increase in corn production, which has increased rates of deforestation both in the U.S. and the Amazon, is related to the growing use of biofuels as a replacement for fossil fuels. Does the deforestation that growing corn causes outweigh the benefits of using alternative energy? This tension adds another dimension to the ethics of energy production.

Although eating locally won’t always solve the problem, it will certainly help, as will cutting back on meat consumption and carefully reading ingredients on packaged products (look for palm oil!).