The Connection Between Food Waste and Deforestation: The Case of the Avocado

Food waste in the United States carries a large environmental toll. In 2024 alone, surplus food—food that goes unsold or uneaten—generated 219 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to driving 51 million gas-powered cars for a year) and required roughly 16 trillion gallons of water to grow on U.S. farms (equivalent to the water in over 24 million Olympic-sized swimming pools). But a large share of what Americans eat (and waste) is actually grown abroad, understating the real environmental toll, including land conversion and forest and biodiversity loss in countries across the world.

Understanding The Connections Between Food Waste and Land Conversion

ReFED is starting to look into the impact of food waste on land-use change and deforestation, and fortunately, there's already good data to build on. Our World in Data has built an interactive tool mapping how much of the food we eat crosses borders, and where it actually comes from, while separate research traces the deforestation tied to commodities imported into the U.S. Together, they show that the cost of wasted food should be counted not only in dollars and greenhouse gas emissions, but in forestland cleared and species displaced.

The Case of the Avocado

Avocados highlight that case clearly. Americans buy more than 2.7 billion pounds of avocados a year, with 85–90% imported, mostly from Mexico.

ReFED analysis of the DeDuCE dataset (Singh et al., 2026) highlights that global avocado production has been linked to roughly 106,000 hectares of deforestation—similar to about the area of Rocky Mountain National Park—between 2019 and 2023.¹ U.S. consumption is linked to about 18,000 hectares of that deforestation, with nearly half tracing back to Mexico.

As many avocado-eaters experience, they can be easy to waste! The window of ripeness is brief and sometimes unpredictable. USDA estimates that a third of the avocados Americans buy never get eaten, and that's excluding the skin and pit. Applying that loss rate to the full volume of avocados imported into the U.S.² gives an indicative sense of scale: between 2019 and 2023, roughly 4.5 billion pounds of avocados went uneaten in American homes. Growing that amount of avocados accounts for an estimated 6,000 hectares of deforestation abroad, an area the size of Manhattan, with nearly half concentrated in Mexico.

The Environmental Toll of Wasted Avocados

In practice, avocado orchards have been expanding into Mexico’s pine and fir forests across Michoacán and Jalisco states, which are critical winter habitat for monarch butterflies from across North America. Over the past decade, more than 10 football fields of forest a day have been cleared in Mexico to grow avocados, including nearly 2,400 acres inside the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Eastern monarch numbers are down more than 90% over the last two decades, in part as a result of habitat loss like this.

"Monarch butterflies make this arduous, 3,000-mile journey to spend the winter in the forests of Michoacán, only to find their shelter gone. Hundreds of millions of monarchs once made this trek, but every year we see the population dwindling. People across the country are trying their best to buy food that’s good for their families and the planet, and it's important that we don't waste the chance to protect butterfly habitat," says Jennifer Molidor, Senior Campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.³

The impacts extend beyond the butterflies. Avocado plantations require significant amounts of water, and in Michoacán that water use has become entangled with land dispossession and violence, as local communities face organized crime drawn to the region’s lucrative avocado trade.

Mexico is responding, with the government banning the export of avocados grown on illegally cleared forestland since last January and a goal of deforestation-free agricultural exports by 2030. Alongside this, Guardián Forestal, an independent Mexican NGO, runs the Pro-Forest Agriculture certification program, using satellite monitoring to screen orchards for recent deforestation. Avocado producers, packers, and processors representing more than 90% of Mexican exports to the U.S. have voluntarily certified, and 2,900 orchards tied to deforestation have been blocked from certified supply chains. The program is not yet industry-wide, though, and avocados from orchards flagged for deforestation can still reach U.S. consumers.

International Supply Chains, Global Impacts

Foods that are primarily imported carry a different international footprint depending on the source country. Wasted chocolate and cocoa products mostly impact West Africa: about two-thirds of the deforestation tied to U.S. cocoa and chocolate consumption traces to Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana alone. A further quarter, though, traces to Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. Coffee's footprint is more scattered: Peru is the single largest source, but accounts for only about 15%, with meaningful shares also tied to Mexico, Brazil, Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Indonesia), Central Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic) and Central America (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras).

Let’s Connect the Dots

Reducing food waste at home wouldn't eliminate these impacts on its own as demand for avocados extends well beyond the U.S. But wasting less is still one of the clearest ways American consumers can ease the pressure their own demand creates on deforestation abroad and the wildlife it affects.

We're continuing to explore the links between food waste, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, and we'd like to hear from others working in this space. If this is a topic you're interested in, reach out to [email protected].

¹ Deforestation figures in this blog are ReFED's analysis of the DeDuCE v2.1 dataset (Singh, Persson, Croft, Kastner & West, 2026, version 2.1, CC BY 4.0). Global production totals are drawn from the commodity attribution file; consumption-based figures use the hybrid (physical–monetary) trade model. All values are amortised over five years. An updated release, incorporating a newer version of the underlying GLORIA-MRIO trade data, is expected in the next couple of months. Method: Singh & Persson, Nature Food 7, 138–151 (2026). Explore the data at https://zenodo.org/records/18953516.

² This applies the surplus rate to the full volume of avocados imported into the U.S., although in reality about 70% of avocados are sold through retail to consumers, with 30% sold into foodservice and likely subject to a different loss rate.

³ You can learn more about the Center for Biological Diversity’s campaign to protect monarchs and communities from unsustainable avocado production and Pro-Forest Avocado (PFA) certification here.