IMPORTS DESTROY FORESTS

A recent paper in Nature[1] highlights an issue that I think many of us do not appreciate: the adverse ecological impact of wealthy countries such as the UK on global forest habitat loss by imports of, for example, beef, palm oil and soya beans. We know from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ COP 26 in Rome in 2021 and their Global Remote Sensing Survey that agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation, but it is wealthy countries that cause much of this by their import demands which lead to conversion of their forest land to crops and livestock farming. These forests are often biodiversity hotspots and, although local demands are the major driver of tree felling, some 13% of the conversion to agriculture is the result of import demands from, in particular, the USA, Germany, France, Japan, China and the UK. Given that we know habitat loss is the major cause of species extinction, this should be a significant concern for us all when we shop. Just look at the labels – it is amazing how many contain palm oil or soya, and it is seldom explicitly admitted when these come from countries where forests have been felled to grow oil palms, soya beans or other crops exported to us. And do you know where the meat you eat such as beef is coming from? Hint: it is often not the UK.

Counter-intuitively, this problem is exacerbated, in the UK particularly, by the conversion of agricultural land to housing, infrastructure or solar panels on fields that should be growing crops (or even to creating new greenspace). That land loss has to be made up somehow, so we import more and more from poorer countries that are converting their native forests to supply us! Is it surprising biodiversity is losing out? Our current government appears blissfully unaware of this with its shocking drive for twelve (yes twelve!) more new towns with their concomitant infrastructure, building on greenspace, weakening wildlife laws and planning controls and such sacrifices in the name of “growth”. It is madness and the government needs to start thinking globally and about negative impacts of what they perversely see as positive actions here on vital global biodiversity habitats. Sadly, I doubt they will because they are ecologically naïve, do not see beyond their noses and do not understand that on our planet everything is connected to everything else or, as we ecologists repeatedly say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

We can all do something about it by choosing what we eat, were our food originates and constantly reminding our local and national governments of their global biodiversity and moral responsibilities.

Just a few of the larger mammals most seriously affected by tropical forest clearance include:

• Orangutans due to palm oil plantations and logging in Indonesia and Malaysia, and various primates, including chimpanzees, gibbons, and lemurs, all of which depend on tropical forests for food and shelter;
• Jaguars in the Amazon and Central America;
• Sumatran tigers due to agriculture and logging;
• Pygmy elephants in Borneo which are struggling to survive forest clearance and developments are cleared for plantations and development;
• Sloths – for example the pygmy three-toed sloth depends on mangrove forests in Panama;
• Giant river otters whose wetland and river habitats in the Amazon are increasingly being degraded by deforestation;

Okapis in the Congo that are losing their habitat due human encroachment.

[1] Wiebe RA, Wilcove DS. Global biodiversity loss from outsourced deforestation. Nature. 2025 Feb 12. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08569-5.

Of course it is not just the large, well-known species that are seriously threatened: it is the biodiversity of all their native ecosystems and the myriad species of mammals, birds, herpetofauna, plants, invertebrates, fungi and microbiota that comprise them.

Betts Ecology support efforts to increase awareness of this ecological damage and to consider the origins of our food and whether it is damaging remote ecosystems in its production. We also manage our local sites to accommodate ecosystems that are as rich as possible in terms of native biodiversity.