Tropical deforestation continues at alarming rates with profound impacts on ecosystems, climate, and livelihoods, prompting renewed commitments to halt its continuation. Although it is well established that agriculture is a dominant driver of deforestation, rates and mechanisms remain disputed and often lack a clear evidence base. We synthesize the best available pantropical evidence to provide clarity on how agriculture drives deforestation. Although most (90 to 99%) deforestation across the tropics 2011 to 2015 was driven by agriculture, only 45 to 65% of deforested land became productive agriculture within a few years. Therefore, ending deforestation likely requires combining measures to create deforestation-free supply chains with landscape governance interventions. We highlight key remaining evidence gaps including deforestation trends, commodity-specific land-use dynamics, and data from tropical dry forests and forests across Africa.

Zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs) are voluntary initiatives where companies or countries pledge to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains. These commitments offer much promise for sustainable commodity production, but are undermined by a lack of transparency about their coverage and impacts. Here, using state-of-the-art supply chain data, we introduce an approach to evaluate the impact of ZDCs, linking traders and international markets to commodity-associated deforestation in the sub-national jurisdictions from which they source. We focus on the Brazilian soy sector, where we find that ZDC coverage is increasing, but under-represents the Cerrado biome where most soy-associated deforestation currently takes place. Though soy-associated deforestation declined in the Amazon after the introduction of the Soy Moratorium, we observe no change in the exposure of companies or countries adopting ZDCs to soy-associated deforestation in the Cerrado. We further assess the formulation and implementation of these ZDCs and identify several systematic weaknesses that must be addressed to increase the likelihood that they achieve meaningful reductions in deforestation in future. As the 2020 deadline for several of these commitments approaches, our approach can provide independent monitoring of progress toward the goal of ending commodity-associated deforestation.

The trade in agricultural commodities is a backbone of the global economy but is a major cause of negative social and environmental impacts, not least deforestation. Commodity traders are key actors in efforts to eliminate deforestation—they are active in the regions where commodities are produced and represent a “pinch point” in global trade that provides a powerful lever for change. However, the procurement strategies of traders remain opaque. Here, we catalog traders’ sourcing across four sectors with high rates of commodity-driven deforestation: South American soy, cocoa from Côte d’Ivoire, Indonesian palm oil, and Brazilian live cattle exports. We show that traders often source more than 40% of commodities “indirectly” via local intermediaries and that indirect sourcing is a major blind spot for sustainable sourcing initiatives. To eliminate deforestation, indirect sourcing must be included in sectoral initiatives, and landscape or jurisdictional approaches, which internalize indirect sourcing, must be scaled up.

Persistent ecological and socio-economic impacts from the expansion of industrial monocultures in the tropics have raised land use sustainability to the top of the environmental policy agenda. As major crops such as soy continue to experience growing market demand and threaten both natural ecosystems and traditional populations, a number of multi-stakeholder governance initiatives have been established around agricultural commodity chains or key landscapes. Effectiveness in curbing unsustainable land use, however, remains limited. In this context, innovative initiatives have blurred the lines to combine both supply chain and landscape governance. We analyze such arrangements—here conceptualized as commodity-centric landscape governance (CCLG)—with an in-depth case study of the Cerrado Working Group, a multi-stakeholder initiative led by civil society and the soy agribusiness to address land use change in that savanna landscape in Brazil. The paper examines how that initiative has come about, its agenda, as well as usually underexposed political dimensions using agenda-setting theory. The research is based on extensive fieldwork in Brazil, with data collected through document analysis and 56 key-informant interviews. The findings suggest that a sustainable development agenda for the Cerrado has been substantially narrowed to become mostly one of conversion-free soy supply, serving more the interests of that agroindustry and its consumers than those of the landscape's most vulnerable stakeholders, such as local communities. While the Cerrado Working Group has importantly broadened the policy scope beyond commodity certification, its limited inclusiveness and a skewed agenda have led to instruments that target only soy farmers as beneficiaries. We conclude that, although effective for targeting conversion drivers, CCLG can crystallize and reinforce existing land use patterns by granting disproportionate power to dominant stakeholders, thus limiting the agenda to incremental changes. As a consequence, distant demand-side actors may exert greater governance authority than the landscape's own population. If embodying norms of inclusiveness and equitable participation, CCLG may serve as an entry point, but it does not per se replace inclusive land-use planning and integrated landscape governance.